The Decline of the English Language

(2024)

Decades after your English disintegrates to ashes

I mould my sobs into melting matchsticks 

Ancestors borrowed adverbs for you from banks

Purchased pronouns to pin on Polling Day

Shoved trolleys of tenses through shops

Photographed your future with a phone 

Scrolled past war crimes in the present continuous 

Swiped atrocities from history’s screen with helping verbs 

Punctuated postcolonialism by coughing up etiquette 

Spent your Commonwealth on semicolons and brackets

Hyphenated ghettos like compound adjectives 

Dashed sovereignty to the slum of second language

Stopped midspeech in the third Carolean period

Heard English escape from Empire’s nostrils

Sniffed the scent of tradition that imperialists tarnished

My tears turned into torches when your English vanished