Greg McLaren #2 Reverse gear, after Nathan Curnow's "Versing"

 

Reverse gear

After Nathan Curnow

These kids were at their parents’ wedding.

Weddings can be undone, a marriage busted,

broken open like grammatical rules

where nouns are twistable as verbiage

will do to suggest.

      Thinking about language

enough to get to first principles

’s back-engineering at its least most

obvious.

                 Stage One are working on how

to STFU, and if they haven’t yet, they never will.

Their jokes begin to make sense, like this one:

"What do a grape and a chicken have in common?

They both have feathers.

                                      Except the grape. It

doesn’t have feathers."

                                     But by not making sense.

Entire parents blame the school system,

and comfort themselves in the knowledge

it could be verse.