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Julie Grenness Aug 2018
This is a true, but amusing tale,
Hope your laughter does not fail,
'Tis a saga of a cockatoo,
Of life, he held a jaundiced view,
At the going down of the sun,
Cocky embellished his own fun,
And at the rising of each dawn,
Cocky's catharsis our ears did adorn,
The parrot kept talking, none listened to he,
Cocky had such a vivid vocabulary,
All starting with "F...ing C...'s"!
We heard his morning matins, you see,
His vespers were hard to believe,
'Twas sociolinguistic acquisition, prithee,
His jaded look at society,
Swearing is cathartic, but so lazy......
A true tale of a feathered friend, somewhere in middle suburbia, in Oz.
Aa Harvey May 2018
A forgotten language of love.


So oafish a man, I could not be,
Except when speaking of ones love for thee.
For I have not in my use of vocabulary,
The words to speak of the way I do feel.


No word do I have to describe my ladies eyes;
So enchanting though thou are, me myself I do despise.
As do I the language of my place of birth;
For no sentence is so profound that I may speak it to her.


And show with conviction, my devotion for this woman,
So my words are seen false and lost in translation.
This is my ode in the language of old,
Thou no teachings has one been given,
One simply writes from the soul;
The heart, the buxom and the mind,
For such beauty I cannot describe, using words of this time.


But one does hope with the use of T.V.,
One has learned enough to speak.
And to speak to thee is ones only wish,
For about thee is all one can think.
And possibly through the use of poetry,
One will be able to speak of ones fondness for thee.


Thou may not be convinced that this truth is real,
Yet I shall not lie to thee.
If a secret must be kept to preserve my dignity,
Or to aid or save thee from my own misgivings.
Then one shall simply hold his tongue,
In order to save thee from any harm.


But if one should speak of ones honesty,
Then know this my Queen; thou are all that I need
And one will not be swayed, by a harlot or *****;
One shall offer you my heart and be faithfully yours…

Forever more.


(C)2011 Aa Harvey. All Rights Reserved.
Harried, Harassed, Hassled and Hounded-
These are the H-words I work by.

Harpies and Henchmen, Harridans and Heathens-
These are the H-folk I work with.

Hubbub and Hokum and Hurly-burly-
These are the places I do it.

Hoodlums and Hooligans, loaded with Hubris-
These are the clients I deal with.

Heartless and Horrible, Hateful and Hurtful
These are the attitudes around me.

Hopeless and Hapless, Haggard and Helpless-
This is the way I usually feel.

What happened to Happy, and Hopeful and Harmony-
These are the H-words I search for.

Hinder and Hobble, Heckle and Hamper-
These are the Hamstrings that trip me.

Heaven and Harmony, Humor and Honor-
These are the things that I strive for.

Havoc and Hades, Hurt, Hate and Hauteur-
These are the H’s that I have to conquer.

Hope, Help, and Herculean effort-
Is How I will finally get myself Home.
ljm
I enjoy word games and searches..  Again, done without consulting a dictionary.
Martin Narrod Jan 2017
I have mistaken you, for the great wielder of language, that in the times of Caesar my father, my hero, the castle builder in mid-century medieval Spain, he was not. Painting mustard seeds and his mistake, bulbs of garlic for warding off the blood-suckers, I don't think it was his intention, but he could paint potatoes the flavor of want my sister and I so craved when she and I and him, revering in our trident throng forged language before a fading Tuesday night.

A painter is great rarely, but occurs in small, adequate attic-like spaces, empty squares upon squares, readied for the taking of language. Art might be the purveyor of its own bright useless entity, bright ripened similes squeezed out of the Dutch into the Latin vernacular our father failed to remember while poking him at midnight to rile him up to bed.

It was a mistake, the one my Godfather made when he started studying French with himself. No ranking professor can rank himself into his own pedagogy. Language might have lost its roots, maybe it even lost its qualities of being official.

"This is the office of the president."
"The President of the United States?"
"No, the president of the DISH Network."

This is for me, not any president I serve. You could have learnedly observed the words my father would spell to me, each individual vowel and consonant given their own power. However, not my mother or sister could undertake with adequate prowess the tenant of speaking as such, and their tongues suffered as their palates poorly undertook their flustered attempts to enter our philocalist resolve for Caesarian language.

Sadly now, as I think of reading. I think of your fingers and what you must certainly claim to be such grandiose proficiency, your digits and dactyls bring a melancholy hoop of unpleasantries to my eyes. Your mistake has been writing as you speak, and speaking as the free-style spoken-word "artists" attempt to do, in a horrifically insufficient and inarticulate way. I know your mistake when I open myself to read the Associated Press, listen to what Capitol Hill has to say, even coming down from the end of the bar it is a sick knot of undoing that I so wish any children we have will never be privy to.

Except on this Monday night where we can still commit our lives to one another without becoming the indigestible alphabet that has evolved into a toxin around us. What chance does poetry have if sentences collapse in short-dialogues? What will become of our hands? Will they forget the feeling of a pen or pencil in their grip? Certainly, those short notes and scribbles of cursive my mother left for my father, sister, and I will take themselves into antiquity with cuneiform and chalk, whether in Spain, The States, or another place, they have stormed out world with writing and grammar mistakes. He who must pretend to be understood by taking up the thesaurus to talk, will never have the qualities necessary to write without totally ******* it up.
Jason Harris Sep 2016
As the water birds lifted from the morning tide,
I found myself being lifted from an unconscious
state to the dictionary by four unfamiliar syllables

like the many poets before me, searching for
the meaning of nomenclature. Interestingly enough,
it could have been me on the other side of a poem

that I would come back to after sundown: an old,
scientific word who first appeared in 1610,
whose roots grew, naturally, like the hidden

interests of a loved one, from the Latin
nomenclatura (the assigning of names).

But instead, I ended up on this side of the poem,
sitting before an empty screen and a dictionary
in a Yankees ball cap and denim t-shirt, slowly

piecing together a poem about a 17th century novel
while trying to include the sudden interest of my
loved one: French parenting literature on healthy

eating, all while slowly tying the loose ends
of a poem without meaning together.
Keeping positive is hard for me
I do what I'm good at not best at
A shadow of the man I used to be
I say what I think, not mean, I get that
Words are powerful things to see
Hear, ignore, twist and use to interact
I'm not worthy of my vocabulary
Wasting away talents I didn't choose
My life is like this poem, not necessary
Off track and has no real use
...
"If my life was a piece of tapestry, words would almost definitely be the threads to form this picture."
Quote is my own.
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