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hyoid
Allowing for the production of a wide range of sounds that other animals
cannot produce, it allows a wider range of tongue, pharyngeal and laryngeal
movements by bracing these structures alongside each other in order to produce
variation. —Wikipedia
it being neither of Ovid nor ovoid
how
then seeing neither
hide nor hair of to speak of
or avoid
it being hy brid
if only in rhyming
what comes of loving
the sound of the words in our mouths
that kind of avid that sort of pleasure
gravid with the
drag of gravel
buoyed in the loosening of lute
what when in lack of
we wishing to speak
are devoid of word
null & void in a word
absurd so to speak
haven’t you heard the word
is null & noid is turd
gid with closing giddy with air
what then in long-legged time
to make of the high
bird
crying in the LMs
what it is to enunciate
where the bone being disarticulate
brings us into art
iculation to voices shoved from throats
shooed
into the hot dry air
why this shy bone at the back of the throat
& how is it
held by muscle & ligament
what has it meant
to lie there silent & waiting
what slip page do we risk
bidden to speech
in wet & car
tilagenous zones ear
rogenous responses
"shaped like the letter upsilon" (υ)
with up so floating many sounds round
as initial letter a rough breathing
& from which in rome four more
letters arose: V and Y and
much later U and W
all those forked & hollow shapes
all on a small shovel in the tongue
small horse
shoe of hope & wish
that hoards its sounds
small dish of phonemes
which when we’re dead
is hied out of
hiding
gaiety transfiguring all that read
falls silently out of our
head
foremost of all
sheds its once sounds
& what then of the four
obsolete letters we know
as
Digamma Qoppa San
and Sampi late of
lately deceased
come at last to
O
mega or to Zed which
ever comes last
so abso
lutely
you
could bet
your life on
that at least that is
what i am
what we all
are
counting on
Dennis Cooley
lungs flapping
(for douglas barbour)
the air up
the throat an elevator
brain an incinerator
headed for light
you feel light
-headed when
it
drags itself up
& over
epi glot tis roof tongue cheek teeth lip
clouds scrap ing rain
off
the mount ains a roundness
threads into pock ets into
clicks that
go off like tickers
into murmu rings and buzz es
air that cre ates dings and bur
stings
exp losions of lips vib rations
in bone a gul ping off lesh
a ru shing through
bone ands oft tissue
tis of you & of us
ho ldings to pa late
a
cur ling of tongue
a tigh tening of ch
eeks the pres
sing to tee
th
a to ngue ins ide
we tness moving
war mandt hick
birds e scaping
thew armth of their f
light
the moistness the most
ness of their lives
in the green or
chards of our talk
the silk clouds are burning
the ir music
every w here ri sing
rin sing
us out
Editor’s note: The original layout of these two poems made their indentations and inter-word spacing difficult to reproduce in HTML. A four-page PDF version was converted to GIF images and is appended here. Scroll down to see all four pages.
— Editor.
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