He was judged by the old university to be <br />A man about whom nothing bad could be said <br />And all of his colleagues were certain that he <br />Knew enough about words to deserve a degree <br />To prove he had so much there in his head. <br /> <br />Mainstream written discourses were people-like, he said, <br />Moving on to what he thought you should dream about in bed: <br />About metastructure content gloss and positive evaluation, <br />About semantics and pragmatics and of course reformulation. <br /> <br />He'd categorised and analysed and split open bits of words, <br />He'd even written articles on the cries of suffering Kurds. <br />He knew about transitives and ergatives and goals <br />But he never really understood why The Sun had used 'coal-holes'. <br /> <br />He'd never been across the yard to fill the scuttle up <br />Or hidden in the coal-hole among the lovely muck <br />And imagined that the Germans were knocking at the door <br />And shivered there all morning, avoiding all the gore. <br /> <br />So he couldn't know the coal-hole hid a million childhood schemes. <br />He was too busy with his lexis and his dogma and his rhemes, <br />Too busy with the many words that buzzed inside his head <br />To notice that his audience had either nodded off or fled.<br /><br />Len Webster<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-visiting-linguist/
