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.

I (September)

Buddha lives with ego. Marcus Aurelius embodies ego. Venerable Bede forgets ego. Saint Teresa directs ego. William Shakespeare imagines ego. Voltaire secretly worships ego. Napoleon Bonaparte nationalises ego. Queen Victoria decrees ego. Sigmund Freud monitors ego. James Joyce satirises ego. Joseph Stalin dictates ego. Spike Milligan cartoonizes ego. Iggy Pop sings ego. Dae-Ho Lee thumps ego. Hanako Ono breathes ego. Victoria Beaumont translates ego. Pedro Garcia drinks ego. Nathalie Masson laughs ego. Anya Vladimirovna subsumes ego. September Smith wrestles ego. Indrajit Pandit beams ego. Henry Appleton re-examines ego. Abdul Wahid inspects ego. Vincent Nguyen survives ego. Helen Jones phones ego.  

O (September)

Out of the O of the human crown crowd our infinite, infantile alphabets. They are crystal wand and blunt instrument. Out of the O of ink bowl, says a second myth, our alphabets walk and somersault over drying mud and mattressed reeds. They clarify and confuse. Moon, in reassuring Orbit, changes abstractly through September. Earth, our only O, bigger than all of us, is yet a blue dot in our grey brains. One myth says the last syllable of recorded time will be a whimpered O. Another says that every letter ever offered will return into the hole of O.