Idiolect
“It isn’t my goddamned language,” I said,
after tripping over dipthongs during dinner.
If he who speaks two languages
is worth two men,
then I must be,
by some accounts,
a 1.7 on the Richter scale,
with a portion of my tongue
semantically lopped off
before it learned to sail.
It stays like a tethered yola,
teased into the wind,
a comma in a storm.
That could explain
my management
of the past subjunctive,
or my seismic strain
to hear a silent h.
The best advice may be
to let sleeping tongues lie,
or lay,
or whichever verb
is right today.
I know I speak two tongues imperfectly,
or three if you count
the glottal stops of youth.
No. I take that back:
Pushing two is fair,
but like the remnants of my hair,
my memory has erased the conjugations
of that long gone past.
“It’s not my goddamned language,” I say.
But,
I guess,
it is.
Forged,
founded,
and forever melded into me,
a dangling participle in a bilingual sea.
