Diglossia.
Art by Splash on Pinterest.
This was exactly how Babel happened.
god, watching how men desecrate the sky
with filthy bodies, sweaty gums, unriddled
courage. god, listening to the mouths of men
speak about which part of his body was going
to be art first. his eyes that hoarded catastrophe
like memory units begging to be virused out?
his hands, a serrated scythe that had swept more
destinies than bodies? god, silence. god, a
solution. god, an evolution. [point of view changes,
many images of god in flesh and blood flash].
man, wiping off his sebum jagged out of his
passion to make an art of god. man, scratching
the outside of his chest to leave scar of curiosity
on the inside of his heart. man, unstill. man,
a trochaic body burrowing into the secrets of
the sky, stressed. then comes the crescendo.
god, a hollowed blade serating the tongues
of men into different strands of semanticity.
man, thinks his other friend speaks the language
of the homo erectus. man, becomes a collapsed
forest watching how language can fall back
into the mouths, flat, meaningless.
Art by Steve Johnson on Unsplash.
In the syntax of some languages, Minnesota can fill in the same gap as Láfénwá.
I always thought my father knew how to do
it best. this cradling of soft whispers into
a form of hissing. exit was the best way to call it.
this shoplift from a noun, to pronoun a
tongue into a little phase of yawning. at dawn,
there was someone out there talking about how
sentences are rankshifted
into morphemes. I picked up my father’s name
in the middle
of this war of grammar, and dusted it against a
theory. of what use is a stopped vowel, anyway? I shouldn’t
be seen talking about the syntax
of a language my body hasn’t built ruins in. home
is home,
even if it doesn’t bear us a poem without dead bodies.
it is all foreplay.
say the cloud is toppling its fibre thick skin into a pine.
say on nights like this, we startle grammar of our wide knowledge
of adjectives and their large cry.
today the late breeze breaks its knuckles into me, into
the windbag of a boy who doesn’t know that things that cause you
pleasure can also cause you pain.
I must
have met that knowledge before, in anywhere but my father’s face.
whatever recognized this mark on me recognizes that i’m a voice
of diphtonghed breath:
it means, in some places, minessota can fill in the same gap
as láfénwá. & that in yoruba’s syntax, ogun can translate into two
different things
if not properly circumcised.
say ogún bàbá mi ni mò ń je
[I inherited my father’s wealth]
say ogun bàbá mi ni mò ń je
[I inherited my father’s tragedy]
in this scenery, you are mouth-washed to reality: the same word
that takes you up can slam
you down.
