Over-Sexed

I’m sure it’s because of my English tongue and my English ears,
That it always sounds most odd to me
To talk of it as he or she.
We haven’t had such talk round here these thousand years –
We stopped such arbitrary splits
And brought all hes and shes to its.

But were we ever minded to go back to where
We see the world as him or her,
Then which for each should we prefer ?
Is this or that a manly or a feminine affair ?
Are dogs all girls and cats all boys ?
Who cares ?  It’s arbitrary noise !

Like Adam naming ev’ry beast,
We then must wander through the earth
From brother West to sister East,
As if the rocks are giving birth,
And sex the sexless mule and yeast,
And war and peace and speed and girth –
And love…?  Now there’s a viper’s nest !
Let’s stick to neuter, that’s the best !

Hybrid Vigour

English: a right bastard-son of a language –
A teenage two-fingers to logical sense.
With lucky-dip spelling – a standardless gauge,
An anarchist mang’ling our logical cage –
We think that we’ve captured it dry on the page
With pronouns and adverbs and grammars immense,
But this is one battle it’s folly to wage –
It breaks ev’ry rule in the end, so dispense\
With these thoughts we can tame it, or even condense –
There’s no passive mood in its imperfect tense.
It’s waiting to trip us, bamboozle, upstage,
And piss on our tenets in nat’ral defence.

English: a beautiful fluke of a toolkit,
And we are its masters, and never its slaves.
And each time we use it, it’s changed just a little bit,
Changed just a little – but should we permit ?
Yet if we can follow, it must be legit.
So don’t stem the growth and the sparkle it craves,
But keep it adapting, surprising, and fit –
And bring on the jargon and slang that ‘depraves’,
And don’t mourn the umlauts and genders in graves,
For this is precisely how Darwin behaves –
Red in its verbs and its nouns and its wit.
You can’t turn the tide, but you can ride its waves.