Language Invaders

by John Davis

Listen to the verbs rattling green leaves,
opening-closing their vowels in deep
yawns. They cackle down the mountain,
snap off ly’s from adverbs, and like anarchists
throw them against the forest floor
strip victims of their humanity.
Hear them hook their consonants around tree trunks,
pull, uproot. More cackle. Spit, kick, club,
create a new language like colonists conquering
Africa. Now they litter adjectives in major cities,
misplace modifiers in townships, steal objects
direct and indirect, interject pointless
punctuation where once words walked barefoot,
moved among sentences freely, sacks of grain
on their heads, their metaphors light and airy
like muslin. Witness prepositions dangling
from tight nooses, not running loose like children
in playgrounds. Language invaders rip up
conjunctions, rearrange the letters into curt
warnings. At every doorway, exclamation points
stand stiff as sentries. But in the jungle the sentence
fragments gather, mend their nouns and pronouns
and the resistance begins.