Profanity - (lalochezia)
There is and/or are a whole library of words I can't say anymore.
Discarded and disregarded like last year's style to the stale closet floor.
All curses, bombasts, withering rails, raving lunacies, angry spells and jinxes,
set to become ancient antique ambered pests, monumental, continental sphinxes.
I can no longer talk, speak, say, shout! them aloud—you see, I'm not allowed—
I may not mutter them, utter them, butter them in a croissanted crowd.
I am strangled, my tangled vocabulary dangled, rankled, twisted-ankled, improperly vexed,
a forest of leaves, each pariah syllable in my skull arguing whose turn it is not next
to tumble all alliterative, echolaliant and reverberational to the filth underfoot, rotting, unforgotten but lost.
Tongue-tied, teeth tripped, lips pursed, palimpsest, flippantly prepared but, but, but...paused.
All because I am inexorably—not suddenly but proper timingly—a father, a Dad, the good example
I am supposed to set untold, despite my skillset I must tongue-hold. Ample
samples of my previous grievous and somewhat mischievous failure abound.
Tongue bitten to the quick, words unheard, the unherdable cat in my head now drowned.
Scatology plowed under, leaving springtime blooms sun-blistered in the summer. But I just can't
drive between the line and the gutter, I must swerve and swear, curse and rant
for all of those who won't, whose lingual leanings drift to the light and breezy
nothings of why, bless his heart, but chew on that fat quite oppositional. Not easy
to swallow such bitter batter. Better apparently to loose a Whitmanesque yawp! Ampler,
but not parently, a demonstration of frustration rather than that bland Whitman sampler.
Oh, my; once I wielded language like a startling starkly stinking sparking chainsaw
in the woods, replacing the cardinal's sweet scarlet chirrup to his wife, raw
with the raucous noxious gaseous snarl and rip-snort of righteous anger,
my youth an energetic weapon, a vocal knife, a verbal danger.
How I lusted after the K in consonant, the F in Foul Language.
I lived to fire conversational flames into any as-yet-uncrossed bridge,
dropping my aplomb bomb, my holy smoking whine, all hot soot and dull
ash pouring up through the chimney and out the top of my overheated skull:
portending detection, selection, election, defection, rejection
or insofar some other insurrection-connection via lectionary confection.
I dropped dirty names for their own sakes, head-unfakes, like the first worst thirst never-ever slaked,
wearing my attitude like worn, torn hunting boots, scorned, adorned with mud and blood-caked.
Squat-house flower in a cubicle, holding forth against sound absorbing demi-walls.
All generously gross Germanic gutturals? Now wrong, atonal song, tongue-inventions and cat-calls.
A sailor's myriad dryad clevernesses born of years gone seawardly afloating,
just because phones keep ringing, fools keep being, bosses buzzing, voters voting.
Restrictions on predilections, suddenly throttled down into sotto-voce semi-syllabic susurrations,
Which, if and when I am ever now, as such, caught, will cause constant consternations.
Hence I am trap-snapped, canis-mater slapped, my life ineffable.
Yammering, stammering, tong-and-hammering, my words un-F-able.
I temper each temple pulse squeezing squirting, fire-hosing the etymology
of everything anger-causing, the A, B, C, D, E effects of idiot's tautology,
unwinding wonder weapons, terrible bloody heart-shots of a wordsniper, leaving me dying, broken
and frustrated to the Nth degree, digging in the growing garden of what cannot be spoken;
confounded by compounded nounverbs, non-patronymic acronyms,
before so freely spewed out at ignoble opponents swinging across the jungle-gyms.
And yet the demand that I must put my command of language into immediate practice,
begin tweaking my freaking speaking like some sort of pink-cheeked, red-state Baptist.
For my progeny are prodigies, each with sweet face and mockingbird-ear
intimating at imitating every god...blessed thing I say and which they hear.
I cannot dash a toe, bash a knee, stumble and lash at me with but a mild-mildewed "Jerk!"
Once upon a time in nursery smiling and absorbent, they're soon enough doing homework
at the coffee table while Barenboim bobs his Beethoven baton at the Berlin Philharmonic
biting his tongue to the second of the Ninth. I know what that's like, to shout is a tonic,
crying out loud with joy and pain at something so beautiful that your heart unfairly mumbles.
But nary a word may slip through the teeth, lest out it tumbles
To interrupt and draw away audience ears, then eyes, then heart
to something unintended, suspended, distended, an offending part.
So it is with a tongue that can curl hair, can turn air a very shade of blue,
If you could perform such a synaesthetic trick, well, wouldn't you?
But I won't and I don't, because I'm trying to be as good a Dad as I'm able
and so if I see an idiot on the idiot box, or drop my fork at the dinner table
I slowly sniff and bend and pick it up, say nothing, for there is nothing to be said
and nothing wakes the sleeping giant of the thesaurus-rex in my head.
But should they one day, not now, not even in a little while
let slip from their precious lips something remotely vile, I'll smile.
For who bothers with a Ferrari Testarossa with automatic transmission?
Who blithely wires 40 watt soft-white lightbulbs to Nuclear fission?
Why, if I'm someone to be down the nose frowned and then say, "how rude" at.
Well, then, truth be told, and frankly my dear...it's what I'm good at.
