The Afflicted Souls Café- Part I
Welcome to the abode
The elected domicile
Of bedraggled languages
As their ships wreck
In troubled waters and rocks.
Brought to its knees is
The pristine, melodious
Haughtiness of syllables.
Blindly the Twentieth century
Hath crowned them collective Empress
Of seemingly stable
Delimited lands that have now
Come to naught
Waltzing in blood and carbon
Nearly impossible to diagnose
The onset of the malaise
The symptoms gallivanting
Between observable senses
Decided by prevailing humors
Spreading elusive signs
Disseminating plausible narratives
Of fake identities
Angels observed
Shaking their heads
Their beamed communication
Unattended and ill received
Though speaking
In tongues
Should have been
A hint
The Book, The Word
Creating Worlds
The Philosophers and the Linguists
And the Neurologists and the Glottologists
The Novelists and the Poets
All elbowing their way
To courtly favors
Unreliable yet head of Empire
Only at beginning and the end
Did language reveal any structural flaws
And all disciplines rushed to save
Its shiny ass, they too partaking
of its Holy Host.
But as Word and Deed and Thing
And Animal and Consciousness
and the Holy Tablets and the Book
Lay in disarray, with no chain of command
And simply would not
Nicely fit into their assigned slots
Cognitive storms arose
And wouldn’t abate
Rapturing even those endowed with
The Golden Tongue and the Golden Brain
So that they too would be forced to doubt
Their skill and station
No matter how hard they invoked
Saint Anthony’s Vocal Apparatus
In its Golden Tabernacle
To grant firm rootedness
in the tongue and chords
[to be continued…]
Pina Piccolo, 4 January 2023
Cover image: Photo of the Tabernacle containing Saint Anthony’s tongue, in Saint Anthony’s basilica in Padua.