Spanguage

A huge essay from Mr Fry here, in which he appears to struggle with his character of insufferable pedant when it comes to language. OK, maybe it's a bit more than that but it does seem to ramble a little, while still remaining quite readable. I do hope he apologises to Alan Davies.

I did make a plan to write a poem each day but as it is not the start of the month, it seems wrong to start this today. However, while waiting for something yesterday I did put this in the notebook. Is it a poem? Mr Fry did say to ignore the pedants and mangle the language as you see fit. So here goes.

Gas and coming up for air, the poetry of safety, the passion stolen from it, like a flame that gutters, sailing over wicks and candles. The doctor in the mind, at fatal wounds, in futile hope of saving men the air bombs ripped in two, their cavities concealed by injury and catastrophic loss of blood. There's rawness in the notes that hides the subtle dregs of meaning and no meaning from the intellect to let it ride and climb in sterilising flames over the smoking, open cemeteries, battlegrounds and coughing, dying infantry. Twisted and burnt, the bones are men and vehicles, rendered the same by weapons meant each for each but catching all. Take a metal weapon in its fiery path across the mud and sprinkle it with soft and loyal bodies. And there's your target, flailing in the marsh, confused and real yet absent from the tales of battle, even this night's write-ups in the pocket books of officers, the futile diaries of the doomed. Ninety years, thirty thousand days and eras pass before I sleep and weep untainted as the staff of companies that failed , decimated, coalesced and were cut-down ten-fold once again, a building tenth of death in the head of us who cannot know, save through some twelfth-hand writing culled from sharp-dressed writers of the field.

Just needs some line breaks and it will be a poem.