Creative Writing People retell the story

Dis-en-tangle-ment

“a word riot at the corner of i & j ”
when the grammar cops arrived
all they found was a math convention
a unit vector n pointing up from the corner of i & j
like an upward screwed right hand thumb
the figurative language authorities were not amused
they suspected a misspelling or worse, an acronym
wry, rye, maybe why not or could it be knot
had they been sucked into a quantitative plot
a wry knot engineered to make them look foolish
they vowed not to let the meaning escape them

no English major would italicize without reason
or could it be simply a poor choice of font
were the I, J and K just to delineate points
connecting the dots was essential
when they triangulated the evidence
they made an obtuse interpretation
the logic of poetry revealed an identity—
the vector cross product direction and magnitude
of the symbolic language they were investigating
proved the anagram trio was algebraic —
they had saved a victim from a math pathology





"You can learn about language just by playing with symbolic relationships."