There comes a time when every word
is an idiom, an oft-repeated life sentence,
whose meaning, like lives, out-lives itself.
There comes a time when language,
the linguist's dilemma, becomes like law,
all repetition and unclear interests
clashing against wooden tablets too long wet.
At such a time, the medium is over-medium,
and the middle no longer flows;
it's a time of cuts
from beginnings to ends without
any of that filler,
when filler fills up with
nothing and the nothing loses itself
and is thus eliminated.
Language has reached such a point.
The starts kiss the finishes,
no lead-in.
The arts speak dinner to towers
and are handed technical manuals
filled with emojis.
Reason eats reason and cannot remember
how to digest the winter season
denying cold and colds
with so many folds
that a single sheet of paper
touches the edge of the moon.
Literature becomes a speech
for an audience whose ideals
shine too bright to be seen.
And poetry becomes like toilet
who can't remember how to spin.
Music holds the echoes
the fiery invention of rhythm
whose embers are drawn down
to postcrustean polymer blue.
The devil details sleep
near exhausted gestalt angels
good paintings of the good
sweating humid phrases.
Where will our desert rise
in this over-whetted world?
Bright pages suctioned eyes.
Silicon used up the sand.
The new beach reaches
teach breaches:
silence,
inhuman,
undefined.
Roman Ryan 