Language Learning

Duty of girls, province of colourful dames,
A "worthless occupation, on the whole"
To begin, with tentatively naming names,
A journey that cannot justify the expense,
In search of what one is - a foreign soul.

If not abroad, where else find the pretence
For the poet’s world, or of the painter’s eye?
Ink on paper scarcely seems recompense 
For falling, like Icarus from the sky,
Against a life's not being all it could

Have been, for washing-up as through a flood,
In search of Utopia, clamorous in defence
Of electrolytic currents, this fountain of blood,
Such obligations being set in stone,
Yet if in stone, then only in a sense.

Fluent in a jingo, lingo known
To scholarly rule and praxis, the local patois
Whose “inimical character” is our own,
But, to the inattentive, overheard,
Echoes on the wind, as from afar.

What more resembles human-life than words,
As one reads them in placards, cannibalised
Tetrameters blinking in the night, or blurred
As to a drunk? Human nature to guess,
To err the more, and erring, fantasize. 

Since nobody promised the truth, who would protest?
And isn’t ignorance rather a relief, 
From heaviness of heart, from weariness,
If love it be, that’s lost when people part,
Clutching at straws, when it’s time to leave?