EXHIBIT A
A poem by Luciana Fisher. Filed in the Court of Public Language
EXHIBIT A
A poem by Luciana Fisher.
Filed in the Court of Public Language
CASE TITLE
The People vs. The English Language
DEFENDANT
Capital Letters (charged with Tyranny and Authoritative Demand for Attention)
Punctuation Marks (charged with Elitism & Obstruction)
Metaphors (charged with Density Beyond Comprehension — Agravante, Your Honor: it showed up in disguise, pretending to be something else entirely)
Poetic Devices (held as suspects for Endangering Accessibility)
PLAINTIFF
The Masses (represented by the Education System, Social Media, and the Algorithm)
CHARGES FILED
Conspiracy to Oppress Readers by Elevation of Capitals.
Unlawful Disguise of Metaphor with Intent to Confuse.
Excessive Use of Punctuation in the First Degree.
Prostitution of Alliteration Without License.
Inducing Literacy in a Population Trained for Scrolling.
EVIDENCE PRESENTED
Witness Testimonies: Chiasmus, Anaphora, Oxymoron, Juxtaposition.
Exhibits Submitted: Language stripped of marrow, sentenced to lowercase.
Expert Opinions: Satire, Parody, Irony.
TESTIMONY (Poem)
Dear readers at large,
This is not a private quarrel between poets. This is a public trial. The case: what has been done to language, to poetry, to the children who inherit only fragments where the whole English Language once lived.
I bring before you Exhibit A. Evidence that in our pursuit of ease, we have stripped words of marrow, starved them into lowercase submission, and called the famine “accessibility.”
We eliminate uppercases as they are too oppressive in their height, as if in a clash of classes, they tower over the masses of lowercases. So, we shrink them by hammering them in their heads to meet the masses of lower caps.
To eliminate division, we also strip the periods, rob the semicolons and colons of existence, dilute the metaphors to oblivion, disregard the consonances and assonances.
We caged Alliteration, as it was caught red-handed, guilty as charged for repeating itself again and again and again. We set the trial of Cacophony for tomorrow and deliberate on the fate of Onomatopoeia for refusing to shut up in court, banging and buzzing until the bailiff had to escort her out. Meanwhile, we sneer in the face of Personification as it opens its doors to the marshals, ready to evict the Litotes with Irony, setting the tone for this enjambment we find ourselves in.
Ladies and gentlemen, we are here for the trial. We must not forget that Chiasmus took the stand (don’t worry, no one in the jury knew what he meant either) in favor of the disservice of the masses so we must call a recess
— Caesura
Meanwhile Anaphora is displaced, leaving the diaspora to inherit only fragments of a language once whole.
So, ladies and gentlemen, we refrain to teach the masses — because keeping them dumb is power. We leave only the (oxy)morons to read the texts, for the Allusion of the Juxtaposition created of the classes.
Oh, dear Satire! Beloved Parody of life! Poetry is kept arrested in the tower of concrete minimalism, accused of exceeding the character limit and failing to provide a hook in the first three seconds while we aimed to complete the fragmentation of the English Language by gutting its marrow, its life.
So, here I rest my case. Let the record show: we starved poetry to death and called the corpse democratic progress and poetic license.
COURT ADJURN
(spelling error entered into the record as evidence)
Please don't make derivative poems without permission. I understand it's meant well but it removes the oxygen from the original work, and it is against copyright law.
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Brilliant! Brava!