Language

You spoke with all the casualness of corporate discretion

soft tongue weaving muted threads of syllabic indifference

until we were encased in the haphazard haze of literacy,

choking on our own self-aggrandizement.

 

There were no colors in your eye that day,

only the grays of conversation,

backing each moment into a corner

like the moral majority of the nineteen-eighties;

your mother fought and died in Tipper's war

but her locution lives on in your touch-tone veins,

soaked through with the blue of oxygen depreciation

you only find in municipal discourse

 

Matter of opinion is a pseudo-science for the impressionable

and they honor their arrangements; you remain sprawled on a steel table-

the dead pine you planted in your grandmother's back yard,

skin drying as each sententious word slips between split teeth

to fall on the ears of the deaf by choice;

"So thirsty," you say.

 

But they only smile,

and they cheer,

and they only cry, "what a wonderful man."