mmmmMagic
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ththth
A childhood stutter and stammer slurred my speech.
I1950s
My mouth resisted the passage of th and gh.
Family and friends failed to decipher my words.
My tongue mangled consonants vowels in my mouth.
Adults thought I was stupid.
Schoolmates thought the same.
I was beaten by three of them.
I came to understand everyone is stupid
And I could never changed that.
My father took me to doctors in Maine
“His tongue is too big for his mouth. Slicing his palate with razors will force his tongue to work more.”
My father rejected their cure.
“My son will live with a lisp.”
Thereafter i spoke my own language
My words belong to me alone
Our family moved from Falmouth Foresides
To the South Shore Of Boston
My mother put us in Catholic school.
I tried to hide my speech
The nuns would none of that
They slapped my wrist for a sloppy th with a ruler.
The same went for gh
slap slap slap
My classmates happy to be spared the rod
The more severe nuns believed I spoke like Satan.
Sister Mary Osmond understood my flaws.
She scheduled speech therapy.
None of their efforts helped
And the bullies at school were more relentless than those in Maine
Strangely my speech in Latin was perfect mea culpa mea culpa mea maxima culpa
I was always surprised the priests understood me
I dreamed of the Devil and I sing Ruby Tuesday without fault
I believed in neither God or Satan.
I was a teenager and we sought to live forever young.
Through books. music. the world.
none of us had to speak in the 60s or 70s
Singer and poets hid us from th and gh
we heard other words
we smelled the history of ancient scents.
strawberries tasted different
flesh was smooth as shaved peaches
And then you stood atop a pass
Or sailed into a city
And everything became more
It was not magic
But only the being here more than now
The spoken stood once
In my way
But not of poems.
poems
whose power has not been lost in the modern age
Even for a boy with a thick tongue,
especially with a Boston accent.