Scribo Scribere

The following is a poem that plays with Latin and with concepts in the study of medieval literature.

Iocundus espresso

The codex of my every thought is of life,

not baring brown, with fine black inkings ruled

or bound into quires (yes, it is dangerous to say

how much I see the ends of my projects),

with initials historiated, penned, or floriated,

excoriated lightly in its way, upon itself so turned,

so frail at every strand that, if I don’t meet it,

if I don’t sway it to the path I want to continue on

(free on! free on! I say), but quote verbatim

the natural paraphrastical mimeograph of my thought’s health,

the disputatum of my comitatus –

no, not this the folio of my thought,

not, no, not scribed in scriptoria penned by hands in floria,

the res gestae of that I I call my own, my one, my home;

oh, to only go further to the human arts,

the art that gives me peace here and past and now and therely,

barely with the desire that is the custom,

, the fortune, the sun and also moon:

you are beautiful, and more beautiful still:

so, come with me into my abundance,

the land, our garden, the city, that is to say,

to make of it our own – not to set ourselves always away,

always apart: that the rising of the sun

, and that the dispute, for, if I never from myself grow

and learn to love my force of thought:

in excelsis gaudio.

And so we know to right ourselves

with proper interpunction

when we have the quite compunction

to live in our united disjunction

and forever on to wind our way.

What I mean to say, I will say in time.

But the small subtleties of language escape me;

they cannot yet take me in other tongue;

I am too young in them yet to believe

in this, that I can also know

the minor points that make it so – graceful.

I am homologous unto myself: what, then, if but a whelp am I?

Connatural with what I see; a simulacrum of myself is me.

But I do not thrall myself to be a mimic:

this, in so many words, is my travesty.

This I quote verbatim: my life is as I’ve made it –

that, I mean, is quite divergent upon this, on my emergent.

I’m an entity of being; I obtain my ever-graying

and my prevail- and my maying; yes, it’s this; I do subsist

in what I dispute, am saying.

If you’re quite careful you’ll get a real earful

of me, no tearful self, but resplendent

upon this, on my ascendent way and ever day,

always and anon to relay the commotion

I always place my hope in;

in short, that is to say, in – espresso.