An institution for my slacked tongue bent back limping through the summer.

I can barely enunciate a syllable.

Coming back to school to teach my tongue.

The kids of the past grew into a world where expansion was denied and the shorter term undercut the more profound one. How I miss the old days, so cliche as to say, when girls and boys used to chant words with over 5 syllables just to exaggerate the length of their ability to pronounce it. Boys lined up to spell out elongated words as their tongues stretched out each vowel sound and spit the remnants into the faces of their opponents. Thier diction elaborate and individual, everyone unique with no individual lacking their own style. Kids dusted off prehistoric words that hid in caves engraved in dried limestone waiting for a desperate archaeologist to excavate them and find purpose for these long forgotten words. These words sang through the chords of millions of kids all around and if someone dared to use a word as monochrome as “nice” they were bombarded with thousands of synonyms ranging from “amiable” to “affable” to “congenial” and on and on and on.

No these children were not pretentious or maybe they were so

but they only did what any scholar would; expand.

I came back to tongue tie myself to school