The Tyranny of Meaning

(A Poem on the Politics of Language)

Language isn’t a soft utensil —
it’s a labyrinth scrawled in nervous ink,
a scalpel and a salve;
gatekeepers and cartographers
mapping the borders of what we’re permitted to know.

We pretend to wield it,
but language wields us—
coiling around our throats,
pulling us into its undertow:
rules that glint like submerged razors,
accents weighed down with memory,
syllables sanctioned—
and vast continents of the unsayable.

Every word is pre-owned,
mortgaged to caste, class, race and gender
inked in grammar books
whose authors are faceless and authoritative.
We polish our mouths for entry,
pursuing the fluent shibboleth,
wanting to be understood—
not ridiculed, not vanished.

In the stutter of a pause,
a whole politics quivers.
In the fissure of a mispronunciation,
invisible structures steel themselves.

We are taught to lust after fluency:
the immaculate utterance,
the accent that betrays no provenance.
But whose tongue is this,
and who profits from mastery?

In that pursuit, we risk forgetting:
sometimes revolt begins with a stammer,
with speaking in fragments—
with coloring outside their prescribed syntax.

To reclaim forbidden edges of our voices,
to let rupture ring out
where we were once disciplined into silence—
this is power.

For the real abyss isn’t made of word

but of decree—the violence of those who ordained     

whose clarity counted and,  

whose voices were mere noise.