He was equipped with a fine vocabulary
Far in excess of his intellectual needs
An entertaining fool
Stocked with dictionaries
Obscure constructions
Medieval verbs
Circumlocutory, verbose
Impenetrable
A simple mind hid amongst
A confusion of entangled phrases
As if using a foreign language
Assembling hopefully meaningful phrases
Where a listener may find coherence
A simple message
Every request
Every Statement
Observation
From his mouth, no matter how mundane
Appeared decorated
Embellished, almost..
Baroque
In this wordy fog
It was hard to know
Hard to find
Traces of a real person
A tangible, relatable identity
Something predictable.
In the swirling wind of
Constantly shifting
Complex expressions
Seeming riddles.
He was a prisoner
A lifer
Doomed to remain
Incarcerated in his usage
Dense, cloying, exaggerated, unyielding
Usage
He could not avoid
Unconscious, reflexive, merciless
He did not struggle,
That ended long ago.
A simple phrase came to me on a bike ride, the first two lines of this poem. It became a short prose piece for my blog. Now it is also a poem.
