Widdershins:

(sometimes withershins, widershins or widderschynnes) means to take a course opposite that of the sun, going counterclock-wise, lefthandwise, or to circle an object, by always keeping it on the left. It also means "in a direction opposite to the usual," which is how I choose to take it in using it as the title of this blog. We're all in the same world finding our own way.

Wednesday, November 16, 2011

Linguist Boy: A Missed Connection

So I posted this poem to Craigslist earlier. We'll see how this goes.

http://bellingham.craigslist.org/mis/2706415366.html

Linguist Boy

Linguist boy,
I would forgive you your bilabial trills
if you would do the math
and make them quadrilabial.
Would you, for me,
cut down that Indo-European tree
so we can keep warm in its ashes?
Linguist boy,
save some sibilants
for my ears in the dark
and maybe I'll teach you
the anatomy I've been learning.
See, that fricative is begging me to stop,
but you left it unvoiced
and it got swallowed in the laryngal folds.
Linguist boy,
I want to explore that interdental space
and touch your alveolar ridge with my tongue.
The topography of your body
is a morphology I want to learn to read
but the phonetics contains sounds
I've never heard before.
Here's a clause, let's draw a tree:
"Linguist boy," that's a noun phrase
with embedded adjective phrase. Linguist describing boy.
"warm up my bed."
I admit the verb phrase suffers some
lexical ambiguity.
Do I mean warm as in heat
or warm as in ffffffuriction
between all those parts you linguists ignore?
We can blend our bodies like
two free morphemes to make something new.
Linguist boy,
do you consider "boyfriend" to be monomorphemic,
or are we two free morphemes
unbound by labels and only loosely 
connected by word order?
These looks and smiles we share
have a semantics of attraction,
but the meaning gets lost in 
a convoluted syntax of time and distance:
wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey stuff.
Linguist boy, 
have I said too much?
I don't want this to be the 
false etymology of a relationship, 
but maybe you can pause
and analyze my language variation. 

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