#488 - casual comedy

 

3.v.21

498

2.121

casual comedy

(study for a work for kids)

 

I got the job in a dictionary 

which is a zoo for words

I was cleaning out cages

tossing in slabs, fixed expressions

                  speech parts

kept the troughs topped

              I had the run of

children and parents

would come to see

    stuffed creatures

[transitive intransitive]

had once roamed in the mind

[I worked up a museum too]

   every act – curation

started out as a picture dictionary

the alphabet was a thing

 

I was the keeper they’d come to see  

for truth as opposed to fact

accurate!   that was it!  

I kept the charts

and the sea lay slow

 

island after storm

we’d play out the flags

tie tongues often as not

sort of a semaphore handbook

 

I kept encyclopaedias too  

sold myself door to door  

           brazen  

[you could look till your eyes were raw

and find no date in volume]

these words were from somewhere

many had been driven out

we’d just go by event

 

I worked a trance someward ho

went well under the radar

took in stray grammars

made poem of nothing but

you could swing a cat in there

 

building building always building

I live in a house of falling down words

Gilgamesh comes to borrow my dust

[turn page for lovely neighbours]

 

nights of a bible pretending God said

a weed in the Jungle of If

[the picture of forever]

 

coax closer then

lived in a word before that

hard shelled

came rapping till saw the door

 

a kettle came tricking up light

and it broke

 

all this in the lexicon

a misted firstness lay over the book

a laying on like hands

and get them off me

 

this was everywhere we’d been

days filing for random

and haruspex

point!

become the arrow

 

everyone was sous chef there

but I was escuelerie

 

it must have been another language

we’d scribbled over to find this way

mattock and trowel and into the map

 

was I a breeder? would we race phrases?

many words were put down

and sometimes humanely

 

pushed the envelope

took up horizons

 

kept the weather   

every word weary of feeling

and you could sound the syllables out

and some days you might rhyme

 

fog

words kept at bay

in seeming random company

 

great ring of keys

I was the gaoler

out of harm’s way

 

ran the repair shop

 

I had my shoulder as much to wheel  

as any who ever wrote spoke

dreaded fine print or what’s said next

or the comeback then

 

I took a breeze right through

 

have it from me as paradigmatic

some come to light

now barely bones

wide field of candidates

 

 the job was mine!

everyone else joined in

 

I travelled the words as well

length breadth

could neither get over nor under

was often lost for them

 

the backward and abysm –

they say looking into the dictionary

is like looking up at the stars

more or less means

past performance is no guarantee

this is the mind of their own

 

a wild beast the market

never gainsaid

cruel master mistress

loose this bonds!

 

no one imagines my banishing

no one remembers my name

 

turn a chord

and come into the strings

 

wild words and till the echo rang

which had a veracity once

since shed

 

I tilled tricks of the bush

called garden

 

there wasn’t a living anywhere near it

no one could clock me there

 

took off my specs

let go of the bars

dreamt jungle

naked in those pages, I

[and a shriek onomatopoeic]

ghost as many as much as any

 

floated freefall down from there

unemployed at last!