I’ve been called overly formal, in the past,
Stilted, too academic, any number of reference volumes used as pejoratives.
This, for the most part, is an acceptable sin–
–better that people think you’re insufferable than incompetent,
And I can assure you that those are the two options, in my circumstance.
The alternative is betraying my origins in the land of clay and cacti.
Nobody really lives there, you see, at least nobody who’s anybody.
It’s all just hicks and trailer trash, drugs and teen pregnancy–
–if you’ve got any sense, if you’re not like them, you flee as soon as you can,
Because if you don’t, you’re stuck there forever, trapped in the clay that hardens into a prison,
Right there alongside everyone else too stupid to leave, or want to leave.
A lazy tongue betrays a lazy mind.
…sorry, what was that about federal funding?
I’d like to think I’ve done a good job of shaking the red clay out of my mouth.
For the most part, I manage to keep the apostrophes off the endin’s–sorry, endings–of my words,
Keep the words from blending together like all’uh–all of the sunsets you can’t see through the New York skyline,
Keep the schwa–the West’s favorite vowel–contained to its proper place, ya would’nt’a–you wouldn’t have even noticed it tried to break in.
Coyote–excuse me, coyote–has three syllables, not two.
(You’ll notice how awkwardly this part reads on paper.
None of these things–lazy, uneducated, poor-people things–show up in respectable writing,
Not unless the author is tryin’a–trying to make a point,
And that point is usually a barb.)
Sometimes, of course, you step in the monsoon-soaked mud anyway,
And it clings to you, bakes onto you, stains your boots so you track it in
And have to leave them in the entryway to keep the floor clean
In this house that isn’t yours.
Sometimes, you don’t speak all day,
And your internal monologue runs half in words, half in images and space and the inarticulable,
And when you open your mouth, the mismatched assemblage of diction and pronunciation that comes out
Has people looking askance and telling you to “speak English” when that’s already the only language you know.
Sometimes, you drive into the vast empty wilderness to watch the sun disappear,
And it looks so much like home you forget yourself, for a moment,
And your speech gains punctuation and loses syllables
That your dear city-dwelling friend has never heard from someone she thought so proper and polite.
She’s never taken the red clay from the ground and formed it into some little sculpture, to bake in the summer sun and last all year.
She just stares at the mud on your boots.