a language spoken whenever the curtains
are drawn with amateur pieces of artwork
meant to look and sound like people,
but poor facsimiles missing lines
that make the figures look monstrous,
otherworldly, nothing like how the figures perceive how they look,
though if we're being perfectly honest,
they sound perfectly coherent, so there's that...
on occasion i will read a book or poem pre-20th century,
but often times i find their style to be bland,
droning on and on, despite knowing that their language is quite beautiful,
though for some reason i can’t help but think that writers before the 1950’s
weren’t all that honest,
but maybe i’m just being paranoid because the disembodied head of shakespeare
lied to me as a child
dixie cup full of plasma distilled down
to basic components that lack any more surprise,
and tossed aside for the comforts of speaking
german on a latin wednesday while curling up
in the arm’s of a stranger because that’s what
that one song by that one singer
said to do, too
Fred Aiken Writing 