DEGENERATE

American English, Shakespeare's idiot,
Subject-verb-object: plod, plod, plod;
This monosyllabic simpleton, dear God,
What can be done to gussy up or pretty it?

A 3-legged stool: I - Me - Mine
Waits for some milkmaid long gone;
A cowboy herds the homonyms along —
Nouns and verbs — one promiscuous line,
And scarcely knows that declensions decline,
For rarely do slovenly speakers repeat
Or focus where the son's rays meat.

Somehow the sexless English conceiver
Writes love poems, even odd odes are tender —
Retaining, oh the wonder, neither
Endings for conjugation nor gender.

EYE CHART

On the eye chart, bold and exact,
Each letter has a weight and relevance;
What then accounts for the dissonant elements
As fonts condense and lines contract?

For some acuter, furtive patient
Who dares to peer between the readings,
No sign is isolated, but leading
Up from latent, links to sounds adjacent,
To raise a text incantatory and nascent.

The spotlight in the dark has only blurred
The black and white, the vision on the soffit;
Patient transfixed, practitioner obscured,
Who will discern the shapes and spell the word —
Optometrist, cryptographer, or prophet?