Posted at April 22, 2020
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The Trouble With Language Is It’s Lovely

The Trouble with Language is it’s Lovely

 

The trouble with language is it’s lovely.

It glints like the satellite in the sunshine it is.

 

I know it well, the revulsive repetition of how obnoxious it is,

When we do that divisive jitterbug we do, and in tap shoes.

 

It’s so loud, some of us don’t say a thing.

 

I spent so many years on the rim of rhetoric

Or the outskirts of the lexicon, I couldn’t tell which.

Either way, on the fringes of something.

 

It hurt.

 

Everyone knows it: language is corrosive.

I wanted my speechlessness to be a fluke,

And it was, but that doesn’t mean hers and his and theirs were, too.

 

The trouble with language is it’s symbology.

 

We all wish to contribute to the noise.

In my case, the only palm over my mouth was my own.

The quiet, mine.

 

I cannot know how it feels to bite and lick the hand that holds me down,

To taste the salt of its silencing, just for the sake of speech.

 

And it’s not fair. Not fair that the tongue and teeth are instruments

That double as self-defense weapons.

 

A trumpet should not have to be used as a club, though thank goodness it can be.

The strange squeal of an instrument misused is not music,

And that’s not fair either.

 

The trouble with language, it’s what we have.

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