They said my mother tongue is barbaric and uncivilized;
So I became sad and in turn, threw caution to the wind.
This was when...
I lost my decency of language use
and so,
my hatred for the English language grew.
Grammar was like having two grandmas
Syntax was like paying tax on every sin
Phonology seemed like tiny ticks on my phone
and morphology, Ohw Gawd!
It was like sweet muffins soaked in sauce.
I was having a public speech;
November 6, 1954,
busy fanning the flames of my motives
then suddenly,
grammar kissed my Jesus
and twinkly twinkly,
the soldiers of language-felony came rushing in
taking me to the cross of shame
and nailing my ignorance to the wood of morphemic-defiance.
Had I known my crimes would have me to the guillotines of profanity,
my head I would have saved for pizzara-n-dish.
The judge stared into my eyes
with sunken sockets
deep into the depths of fear.
My heart rested on nails and crushers
and my beats looped on crouches
as he read Humpty Dumpty
of my unforgivable sins.
“this man here,
I consider a linguistic minor,
has proved dangerous to the wellbeing of language.
For on the 7th of November, 1954,
he said with no reservations,
‘we must all [fights] to make this revolution a success’
and as we all know,
Section five of the concordial and tensile constitution
Clearly states
‘No man shall prove dialectal-deficiency in matters of public concern’ ’’
Maybe my head could have been saved;
and my pound of flesh, reserved
but ohw Gawd!
I murdered the last born of phonology.
I had started to think that all romances turn out tragic;
Shakespeare I must ask,
and my stuckedness to civility to my waterloo;
Myself I must inquire
For it was meant to be a wooing of my sweetie pie
But who knew it would be my hellrunoff-line?
“I [ombli] ask for your hand in marriage”.
Pardon my manners;
my head must travel down this lane
from the blade through the rolling levers
for the judge read aloud.
“No man,
Incompetent in matters of phonetic articulation
must murder an ‘[h]’ "
but how could a man
show his manners to a gentle lady
than to attempt a variety
higher than the roof of his tongue?
In the least,
My counts were about a hundred.
Maybe I could have saved that last piece of my head;
a souvenir to my brother
But Ohw Nou!
I womanly slaughtered paradigms and syntagmas
and in the same hour,
I shattered collocation.
My bad!
I severed the right arm of semantic relevance.
I was on the walkway:
Mono-logging about my immediate difficulties.
My minusculeness in a world of linguistic complexities
and so I said,
“I would one [days] have a lounge in my cup of cupcakes”
Little did I know
that the diglossic winds of stratification carried my mumbles away.
So,
here I am,
with a thousand linguistic count-charges,
being dragged to the blades of my deficiency
that my head can be tossed off its roots.
But before the melon on my neck spurts,
before it rolls down the isle of minors.
Before my blood drool through this metal slab;
This I must confess,
that I have no regrets;
for my babarikness in my cold blooded murderings
cause language to me is nothing.
Nothing but a convention of lemon-flavoured ice cream.
Author Bio:
Anu Soneye was born on November 20, 1999 in Ile-Ife, Osun state, Nigeria. He is an undergraduate student of the Obafemi Awolowo University, Nigeria. He loves to write poetry and short stories. He is also a lover of music.