Turn It Tongue Poem by Julia Luber

And now the tongue like a drum takes hold: a mantra following some distant thunder
that happened in some prehistoric time…..and warned a tribe of some doom and devastation,
somehow still being turned to automated rhyme even in this twentieth century nation.

That tongue is pulling an all nighter all day too. Tourette Syndrome, some kind of
illness towards silence in me, in you. A confiscation of direction and decision all bound
and wound. As if that tongue were in a cast and run aground. Uncomfortable, exiled from
the plangent sea, with repetition incrementing llike a bead or centipede.

Is it warning? Allergy? Like a fire engine screaming down the boulevard?
It's so unpleasant. It's so frightening. It's so hard.
It's so hard and painful and dizzying to be around.
It's such an unnerving and disarming sound.

Traumatic pan-pipe. Disengaged habituated wipe.
Speaking in tongues for a religion that indelibates
a turn of that tire worn tongue into a tire's worn out tread, a kind of dead fans the nerves
of your mind, of your tongue; a painting hung, a highway to hell, a Total Wipe Out.
Please Don't Tell!