Unintelligible

Joe Strickland 1986 (Hobbysville, SC)



You are the dialect
I strive to understand,
But your words trip up
My tongue,
Stumbling like a newborn fawn.
I rehearse and repeat
Morning, noon, and night,
And still your essence
Is out of view,
Like dreams long dead.
I pour over your syntax
Like pages in a book,
But your meaning remains
Like an unsolved riddle,
As a dead language
Written on the walls
Of a long forgotten cave.
Far too many grammatical rules
To commit to memory.
But, despite my best effort
To bridge this divide,
You remain a mystery,
A code hard to unfasten.
You are a language,
A foreign tongue to me,
And even in striving to learn,
Our connection remains unseen.  

It's impossible for me
To understand you.
But to be fair,
You don't understand me either.
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Written on May 22, 2023

Submitted by JoeStrickland on May 22, 2023

46 sec read
133

Quick analysis:

Scheme XXXXAXXXBXXXXXCXXXDXXDACDXX DBXX
Closest metre Iambic trimeter
Characters 732
Words 154
Stanzas 2
Stanza Lengths 27, 4

Joe Strickland

I'm just a regular, blue collar, working stiff who took an interest in writing poetry many years ago but until recently I haven't had a desire to share any with anyone or pursue publication. I'm an unpublished fork lift operator by night, and a day drinker by choice. I can be followed on Twitter @JoeStricklandSC more…

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