As most of you know, and as I tend to show,
I love to write passage in rhyme.
It flexes my brain, and allows me to gain
more insights to words over time.

But lately I’ve thought, with all I was taught,
That English is really quite weird.
In fact it’s absurd, when it comes to some words,
that sound nothing like how they appear.

So for today, I thought I’d display
Some of the feelings I’ve had –
the best way I know how, by writing them down,
to show that this language is mad.

There are rules when you write, though try as one might,
understanding them isn’t that easy.
Like ‘i before e, except after c’,
as in science or glacier and species,

Because you should know, in examples below,
that ‘rules’ can fly right out the door.
But give it a shot, with all that you’ve got,
to makes sense of what’s really a chore:

I once had a neighbour named Keith,
who was always consuming caffeine.
Always seizing the day, in the weirdest of ways,
And beaming with heightened esteem.

He’d forfeit his sleep, in favour of beans –
roasted and ground to a dust
He’d never conceive, of getting more sleep,
his veins full of jitter and thrust.

So here’s to old Keith, and his feverish beans,
whose reasoning was rarely aligned.
Neither awake nor asleep, for most of the time,
he’d weirdly make nonsense a rhyme.

You can see from above, that the language I love,
sticks not to its own set of rules.
So how can I trust, all the lessons discussed,
and the things that they taught me in school?

Well, they say to do well, when trying to spell,
To practice just ‘sounding it out’,
So lets give that a try, though I fear I may cry;
already I’m feeling in doubt.

We’ll start off quite easy, with words that are breezy –
with something we all can relate.
Words we might say, throughout every day,
yes I am sure this going to be great.

“It’s simple”, they say, “just spell it that way,
the letters will show you the sound.”
But ‘knife’ starts with K, and ‘knight’ goes that way –
So what logic have we really found?

Or ‘queue’ – quite a sight – five letters of spite,
just meaning to stand in a line.
These rules on parade, improperly laid,
by scholars who claimed it was fine.

Remember, I said, “sound it out in your head,”
and spelling will surely be fine?
Well through, though, and tough make that process quite rough,
A linguistically steep uphill climb.

So good luck to you all, with words big and small,
the logic’s as lost as can be.
While plumber keeps B, an gnome guards its G,
pterodactyl begins with a P.

Oh, English, phsaw, I see what you are,
you wonderfully wild old scamp.
You like to state claims, but they’re really just games,
and you change them whenever you can.

So here I will end, though I can’t comprehend,
this language, both curse and delight.
It can baffle, amuse, confound, and confuse,
yet somehow, can still sound just right.