The Syntax of the Abyss
 |
| AI image generated by the Bytesized Studio |
The Syntax of the Abyss
If Lovecraft taught Grammar
In the beginning was the Word—
not a warm word of hearth and breath,
but a colder utterance, ribbed with rules,
a fossil pressed silent into the shale.
Before there were oceans,
there were clauses—
dependent as barnacles,
clinging to the hull of some unspeakable sentence
that sails still through blind depths of thought.
I have seen it.
In lamplit hours, when ink grows viscous as old blood
and the page yawns like a pale, unblinking eye,
I hear the scratching of infinitives split upon the rack—
their halves writhing, still grammatically correct.
Nouns breed in the dark.
They name things that should not be named.
Each syllable is a key cut to fit a door in the marrow of cosmos.
Pronounce it properly; with accent marks like hooked claws
and the lock turns.
Verbs move.
Oh God, how they move.
They conjugate through tenses like eels slipping between eras—
past perfect, future anterior—
as if time itself were only a modest auxiliary.
I once misplaced a comma.
A small thing, you think, a freckle of ink.
But the pause it swallowed was the breath between worlds.
The sentence ran on, and with it ran stars,
colliding in a fever of unchecked conjunction.
Semicolons lurk like pale custodians of forbidden balance;
half-stop, half-summoning circle.
They join what ought not be joined.
They promise restraint while quietly negotiating treaties
between rival infinities.
And the hyphen, that frail bone between two words,
is but a bridge of cartilage over an abyss of unarticulated terror.
Cross it, and meanings fuse like conjoined twins whispering
in a language older than lungs.
I have diagrammed sentences as monks once mapped the spheres—
subject enthroned, predicate orbiting with obedient modifiers.
Yet beneath the tidy lattice something writhes—
a subordinate clause never meant to close.
Parentheses gape like parentheses do, small mouths in the text,
murmuring asides to the void (we were not meant to overhear them).
Even now, the page rearranges itself when I am not looking.
Articles evaporate.
Definite things grow indefinite.
Certainty loosens its collar,
wandering out into a cold unconjugated night.
Capital letters stand like cyclopean monoliths at the beginning of thought—
solemn, erect, declaring dominion over the lower case.
But remove their height and all proper names collapse,
Faceless, as if identity were merely typographic hubris.
Grammar is not law.
It is geology, pressure over epochs, sedimented agreement,
the fossil record of ancient tongues that died screaming in dialect.
And somewhere beyond the final period, beyond that polite, black sun
that closes every utterance—there is an ellipsis…
Three stars in a row.
A constellation of omission.
A promise that the sentence does not end—
only trails off into a syntax too vast for lungs, logic, or mercy.
Beware the proofreader who stares too long into the margins.
For the margins stare back—ragged coastlines of white
where unsanctioned phrases gather
like barnacled gods waiting to be parsed.
In the end, we are but modifiers—
dangling, desperate for attachment,
afraid of misplacement.
And when the final edit comes, when the red pen of oblivion
slashes through our fragile constructions,
we shall learn what every sentence fears:
That meaning was only ever a fragile agreement;
a tense held together by trembling concord—
and the universe itself
a draft
awaiting
revision.
-----
I would love to know what you thought about this piece.
Please consider leaving a comment.
Comments
Post a Comment