At school they teach us rhymes,
for learning simple words,
Sally Anne Is Dancing
Words do the box step
Letters jig the twist
Paragraphs become an amateur line dance,
As punctuation! misses, the beat.
Big Elephants Can't Always Understand Small Elephants
My dancing hand is illegible,
Letters variably miniscule to colossal,
or else mirrored and turned on their head.
Words wince from margins, recoil away from lines
and with time flee my mind and page.
Mrs D Mrs I Mrs FFI Mrs C Mrs U Mrs LTY
Spelling sheets, as creased as my brow,
with the effort of learning them.
Work books with bold print
explain tasks
which make my head pound.
I before E except after C
The written word means painfully little to me.
