2 Poems

Hope–

or more accurately, one who hopes,

a name chosen for a chosen language,

wholecloth lingua franca, an attempt

to unBabel, unpunish against anthem–

anathema—the effort noble in a way

that humans aren’t. It hopes

for less human humans, a gleaming

city of the future, stainless steel without rivets,

not our watersplotched metal.

This cultural couture, this static

fragment, guttural and gutterless,

constructed consistent control for erudite elite,

Eurocentric solution for Eurocentric problem.

Anticipation of needs will not cover all needs.

Definition of wants will not cover all wants.

The creation of Esperanto ignored the slow

trickle, the muchness and muchness–

from Protoindoeuropean etchings, irregular roots

hold fast—held fast—through millennia

of bloodstained heartbeats—drift, loan, shift, stone,

trade and conquest, travel and love, sack, siege,

sandpaper tongues—friction is a way of holding

cistern words, stormeye syllabaries, baroque

colloquialisms, with macrosyllabic ecosystems filling

gaps in the blankness through raw structure of use,

tongues flinging diction with casual purpose.

Babies learn to smile by imitating smiles,

and children must relearn irregularities—rough plough,

tough dough. Language comes from the scratch

of alcohol on the tongue, the yawp of a companioned

wolf, gradual sophistication of the larynx, gradual

cohesion of protophonemes, phenotypes scrabbling

towards what we recognize now. Speakers and listeners

must evolve simultaneously, vocal gestures accruing

through mutinous isotopes, the convergent evolution

of false cognates, erosion to vestige—feel stumps

from wombtails—dialect as both wave and particle.

A broken mirror makes many mirrors.

Fish don’t care about the rain, but the ghoti

flops gasping out things and stuff as tapestry–

a mosaic of threads. And when one frays, another slides

in, mutable as myth, the action within abstraction,

idiom ideation. Ow is the sound of ow,

but french dogs say ouaf.

We are not high elves in a void

01100111 01101001 01110110 01101001 01101110 01100111 01100011

01101111 01101101 01101101 01100001 01101110 01100100 01110011.

As Esperanto accrues history,

it will become more real–

ĉu ni atendu?

Carried on the breath, each language breathes–

Latin for breath is spiritus, that which dwells

within us. But I wrote this poem in English,

the pirate tongue, that current overlord of mouths,

so much of this is surely moot. In Esperanto,

moot is not a meaningful root, so I lay this elegy

down to rest.

In an infinite universe,

you survive smallness.