City Language

Daniel Owen

after Wiji Thukul

I
City language is this-that language.1

II
City language is a toneless phone.2

III
City language is if/or language masked with if/and language.3

IV
City language is the erotics of target market analyses.4

V
City language is piffle-paffle.5

VI
City language is the language of need translated to love translated to fabrication.6

VII
City language is bereft of twilight.7

VIII
City language is very well then language.8

IX
City language is refuse language.9

X
City language is commuted destiny.10

XI
City language is drunk on holodecks.11

XII
City language holds us at embrace.12

XIII
City language severs its speakers and compensates them with itself as severance.13

XIV
City language is tired.14

XV
City language hems and hews.15



1

Forfeiture, magnification, magisterial snow globe, floor show, tit for tat tête-à-tête multiplied.

2

Homebred across a boothless phone. Bordered bones cross the picket line of the cell wall.

3

Or, if the masks are mistaken / And, if the masks are mistaken.

4

Bears the drive to sleep naked all day in a honey-tongued nest of human bodies, only some of whom resemble yours. A languorous playdate, rest and whole. Yet this drive is kept, hidden behind walls of plastic fate produced in ubiquitous dens of bonded behavioralism, cemented into place with basic enfaced structural violence. Yet, and yet (& yet).

5

Ticky-tacky, razzle-dazzle, wacky taffy, raggedy anodyne, slagheap protocol, proof-of-payment, anonymous racket, witness-protected pain believer, pain agnostic, painableist, paintheist, angels and demons.

6

And weed. And hate.

7

Or, it turns out, merely immune to twilight. When administered orally with 25mg of waning day derivatives, a majority of respondents reported very little to no change, while nearly all of the remaining respondents reported very slight to very little change. However, at higher doses studies suggest it can cause the illusion of earworms in cats, untenable identification across difference, spume tongue, and, in rare cases, static dissolution, before again waxing into bereavement.

8

The same jokes over and over again with different results. Ax reinvented. Stoop. Gate. Scopes, scapes, sights, scraps, hoops, hopes, heaps. Waiting on the bus or the messiah in the same breath. By the same token.

9

E.g., stolen cars, swollen arse. Ars summa legitimalated. Usufruct language. Suffer language.

10

Plain sight genocide, broken life, open air clearance fight, strangers sold back as proof positive.

11

Horatio Alger, Pizzagate, Empire State of Mind, Star Wars Trilogy trilogy, dreams had, the grounds of commensurability, the silence in which what we’re taught to stay silent about speaks in tongues.

12

Craning arm’s length, breath and bosom.

13

Stereophonic resound system to be much talked of, selves-sung. To be verb and possibly prophecy.

14

Us-them language. Pus-phlegm language. Not a day off.

15

Lonely as a timeline I wander, no. Timelines wander lonely as a no. No wander. I as a no. Lonely, line time. As I, a timeline. Lowanderly, no. No, no. On a random eyelite, will as ion. An endemic iron aleatorily swoll. On no.