For many of us, school has started once again. I was talking to a young college student, majoring in Engineering, who was thrilled to report that his study of grammar, mechanics and the English language in general are 'over and done with, forever!' I cannot imagine what that would be like, and so will persist in my unbelief ( in the existence of a world without constant study of prepositions, punctuation and paragraphs) by posting this poem homage to that classic manual of usage and style.
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For Strunk and White
What clause comes in the night
do parts of speech sneak up, I bet
they make threats they can tell
you fear the first second and third
person
pure blue, her night dress on the table
she is still able to figure out the tides
making figure eights the pure blue slip
covers up her dancers hips he predicts
you will modify what moonlight lets run on
her pluperfect body
a polity not of mouth’s right angles but of roller skating enervating algorithmic swiveling like lipstick the flimsy shift colored somewhere between green and violet
and then this conjunction because the quick brown fox and i before e except after
c and sometimes y. Sometimes why perfumes the air and he and she wish to
dangle prepositionally but instead must quickly
left
left
left right
left
to the busy ant hill go with cotillions of speech
build and build your words
