X-HEIGHTMENT

a chilly Monday evening
loping through lawyerland
tracking down
The Ampersand Arms
where eager ascenders
would find a bookless book club
set up as a fontfest
a typosensorium

betwixt the temples

here we would discover
if our experience
would be congruent
with our anticipation

as the slides duly showed
enabling font ratings
and type rightings
we strived to distinguish
implied limbic meaning from
implied social meaning
while the dingbats below us
pounded a pub quiz

through the floorboards
further enabling us
to judge a pub by its signs
of impaired social meaning

tabulating the superadditivity
of shop-front semiotics
and the marginal gains
of Lord Font-le-roi
we absorbed the cranking alignments
of outspoken characters

putting a boldface on it
I ventured to point out
that claims of constructed realities

were not justified
and might even
in this old Grecian Coffee House
be greeking

it seemed doubtful too
that Sapir and Whorf
merited a raised cap
but the dim remains
of a drawn-out pint
were raised for Erving Goffman
before we headed off
to face the codes.

​