Language Barrier

I am incapable of this mastery.

The Italian at Henry Miller’s grand birthday dinner-truly a birthday, or was it a lie on Miller’s part?-Arturo, cried in pain at his fellow guests’ eloquence and vocabulary. He knew he could never master the English language as they had.

And, as such, I shall never understand the language of this foreign land I seem to have immigrated to. I cannot possibly fully comprehend this ugly dialect.

It is now I see the vultures, just as Henry was at the head of the table, boring word after word of barbaric, eloquent torture into the ears and heart of poor Arturo.

Am I not the victim of such sadists? My limited knowledge of the tongue spoken here in this barren land constitutes no art form, simply enough functionality to barely scrape by.

This pop art form seems to drift from my understanding, placing more and more distance between me and the artistic tendencies of this wretched generation.

Am I an unwilling exportee sent to a foreign land without any guidance?

Have I been sent as a revolutionary?

Have I been called to create a new language? To do so would be impossible-I would only be seen as the catalyst in a controversy, the ultimate blame placed on my head.

Am I to change this art form, sign my name at the foot of an obscenely unconventionally designed canvas? How can I? I shall simply be associated with the stirred emotions that stir the hearts of angry mobs threatening my very existence.

I want to be faceless, nameless, heartless, voiceless, my disembodied ideas left to wander into the heads and hearts and dreams of others stronger than I.

It is now I realize that I would be doing no more than what every revolutionary called to action has done-retreated. Their disembodied ideas come to me, words of a foreign language only I seem to understand. I cannot possibly leave the pieces of my duties behind for another to simply pick up and carry on with.

I refuse.

Change is at hand, and I am the last speaker of a dying language. I cannot let the longing to fully understand the language of others allow my native tongue to die in my orifice. I am the last to translate this forgotten dialect-for, without it, we shall die.

I will not bow to the language of the masses, for the tongue my mind and heart speak in is far more eloquent than the words that spill out of the vultures’ mouths.

With clarity, I can hear each word for their true worth. They are words of objectivity, of conscience, of justice.

Words I cannot let this world forget.