J

 

[J]

 

Broken handles cracked cornices ended cities

Jeremiah was a committee breathed aleph breath:

stand behind this line, backend blown out tongue!

How do committeemen say, bulldozed into the sea?

 

Aim in this crushed context, their job in a word

to push rubble into airshape, restart knowing.

Overnight be exile, over again, all over

razed to the ground not once, twice, centuries.

 

Would you say Jordie they’re the first book

distress signals from inside the nowhere

I can’t breathe, spoke in their own version?

 

Centuries to unchoke, to unbroke buildings

letters of tears flames rags eyes closing

heat and force wouldn’t you say, curling fragments.

J (May)

BBC 19^th century dramas reassure us we may cross the street, hat or no hat. Jaywalking begins about 1915, around the same time as traffic light technology. The police are so concerned for our safety, not to get knocked over by a jalopy. Disconcertingly, police can ask for our identity if we jaywalk. Despite being “staggeringly inaccurate”, with facial recognition technology police will try to identify jaywalkers; easy if your head’s a potato, less so if it’s beatlesque broccoli. Jaystalkers’ facial recognition will contend with a permanent run on hats. Umbrellas, ornate their J-handles, will be fashion all year round.

J (February)

J is for Jump. “Veering between biopic and dystopian-spoof, this latest addition to the Trump Loyal craze (‘The Lady Is A Trump’, ‘Donald! Duck!’) disgraces itself gracefully, in keeping with the jeu d’esprit of the genre. Fake news of a nuclear scare on 5^th Avenue is juxtaposed with halcyon days of February Seventeen, when Bannon (Sean Penn) was still 45’s BF. K is for Kafkaesque, as in alternating sequences we travel down 45(Gene Wilder brought back from the dead)’s cerebral cortex towards an ‘overwhelming question’ (Eliot): who are all these Unlikes on my Timeline? Get them out of my Face!”

J (September)

The last letter of the alphabet is J. It entered English after being invented by Gian Giorgio Trissino in 1524.That year Luther and Karlstadt disputed in Jena, circa September. There it is, i with its tongue hanging about. The first English language book to distinguish between i and j was published in 1633. That’s the year George Herbert died, ever sensitive to tonal distinctions. The next letter of the alphabet will be some time coming. Yet, when we hear the consonantal variations of Global English, our current 26 strain to be equal to the task. Tongue clucks, lobs, hums, yet.