Lingual Liberation

Is there no escape?

Oh, there's plenty when we’re twenty minutes old.

Escape is our gestalt, the only game –

more freely full of more than can be told

than when we learn things have a name.

Then what used to gape

into the guileless light shuts tight.

The strict intractability of settled form

debars all flippancy or easy possibility

of freeing fantasy: it cools whatever’s warm.

We lose our bright irascibility

when labels lasso sight.

That has to end up being when,

as soon as sensual perception

gains a shape, becomes syllabically defined,

succumbs to context and syntactical subjection,

an essence drains out of the mind.

There's no escaping then.

But beauty breeds as well in aberration –

indeed may seek the confines of a word.

That you can see a thing take wing

and later learn to label it a bird

may prod a mellifluity of lyric you might sing –

who knows? – to bring alluring lingual liberation.

.