The man with the sunglasses rises above
The student-and-teacher horizon as he postulates himself
Onto the podium.
He grabs a textbook and opens the pages
And flips through Chapter Thirty
With dirty fingers that dare blacken the whiteboard in the back
With his words.
I’ve heard that he never carries a cane or whip
To drive out uneducated savages from his scholastic chapel,
But that he flogs each and every academic heretic
With a lash of his sharp tongue.
They and their teachers repent, and his and his own God’s wrath is satisfied.
The man on the podium gestures for the wind to keep calm
And to silence his opposition.
He speaks with a voice that could shatter
Diamonds to dust
And bring the mighty down to their knees.
“Please, be quiet,” he commands like a magnificent magistrate.
“And hear me now as I preach these
Words of Wisdom to you,
Lest you forget what I mean.
“You see,
Words of Love bring Life,
Words of Hate bring Death.
Through thousands of millennia,
Language has been the majestic medium
In which we, as human beings,
Could communicate
To the sane and the insane
Our main thoughts and feelings to each other
And other mortals.
When we have first built our Towers of Babel,
We fell from great heights because
We have never considered how important
Speaking, Listening, Reading, and Writing were
To uniting with the Divine Order.
We have been oppressing ourselves with our own linguistic and literary ignorance,
And have dragged Reason, Plato, Confucius, and Greatness down to the
Ten-Thousandth level of Hell.
The Devil is laughing at us
As we wage war with each other
And grow to hate one another
Because we were born with different tongues.
“My brothers and sisters,
Intercultural communication is not
National degradation,
Nor compensation for our self-loathing and goading of others,
Nor emancipation for ourselves from mental slavery
To find that pot of gold
On the other side of Sugar-Candy Mount McKinley Mauna Kealoha.
It is spiritual regeneration
Through the transcendental meditation
Of memorizing and galvanizing the most Direct and Indirect Methods
Of Grammar Translation Theories,
Making Love through Language Learning
And Taking Love through Language Teaching.
“If that sound like a mouthful of words worthy of
The Pyramids of Giza and the
Great Geezers that sleep in those
Valleys of the Venerable Scholars,
Then do as the Romans do
And lend me your ears.
Language lifts us up to mountains that top even the highest summits on the planet Mars.
But as deep dark trenches scar the bottoms of the big black seas,
Language leaves the mark of a once great and powerful Oz
Or some other grand civilization akin to it.
As books burn, so do the words within and without them,
And there is no pleasure in watching them turn into
Ashes to ashes,
Dust to dust.
“And as the voices of the last speakers and semanticists
Are silenced and lay still forevermore,
May their hallowed graves and gloomy vigils
Stay silent as a warning
To the tilting and toppling heresies of eradicating language.”
The Preacher fell silent,
And as he closed his book and walked off the academic altar,
The words cut through me and my fellow students and teachers deeply
Like a whiplash.
Note: This is the first draft of a slam poem I wrote a while back under my real name.