Slowly but surely, my lower-case vowels are disappearing from my handwriting.
Oh, not from my speech or type,
They are purely the pencil and pen type vowels,
and none of those boisterous, proud uppercase letters show any signs of deteriorating,
but if you look closely,
the torsos of my i's are shrinking,
so that they now look like colons,
My e's are gnawing their own jaws off,
becoming c's in the process,
likewise, my a's, o's and u's are showing similar signs of leaving,
their bodies folding in,
and then out.
(y's, unsurprisingly, have yet to begin the precipitous decline into obsolescence)
There are many competing explanations out there:
- it's pure evolutionary necessity for vowels to disappear,
like pinkies or gingko trees,
they've lost the ability to function in the natural world.
- in this globalized economy,
countries are cutting the vowels out of their words,
Saving time and paper, shipping vowels overseas,
and my hand is only the next in line to feel the effects.
My favorite explanation
Points to a certain antsyness on the vowels' part:
- current philosophical discourse emphasizes the futility of language,
Our inability to express the painful and unfathomable through mere words.
Perhaps my vowels were the first to catch wind of this,
Pack up their little suitcases,
And edge their way out the door.
What repercussions will this have?
I'm sure I can function pretty well without vowels,
"onomatopoeia" will become "nmtp"
but other than that, I'll manage...
Someday,
I'll tell this tale to my tucked-in children,
A story with intrigue, mystery and a moral:
"Cherish your vowels while you have them— you never know when they'll leave you."