STAR POems: Logology

An Isogram is shy of icons

It only likes sole runes alone

No want for right or for wrong

And a word as bare as bone

 

Pangrams, however, need them all:

Judge my vow, you sphinx of black quartz,

They require all twenty six letters to call:

Glib jocks quiz nymph to vex dwarf

 

While acrostics aim to organise

On or across the lines

Revealing a message in disguise

Divined by reading the signs

 

Palindromes read the same each way

(A madam’s kayak, or a redder racecar)

Ambidextrous words are at play;

A man, a plan, a canal, Panama!

 

Semordnilaps playfully reverse meaning

Like a mood of doom when one redips in the tub

Adding a slant, they can be demeaning

See Milkwood’s village of Llareggub

 

Spoonerisms are named for a man in Oxford

With whose mistakes we’re now so enamoured

He believed the Lord was a shoving leopard

And liked to dine on a soul of ballad

 

The tautogram takes text to totality

Letting letters lie languorously low

Slow slurring sentences so sluggishly

Not needing neologisms, no no

 

The tautonym rhythms pound away

Dum-dums go pum-pum on tom-toms

Dodos and dik-diks whip and nae-nae

As the go-go girls suck their bon-bons

 

Anagrams I’m sure that you know

‘Eleven plus two’ is ‘twelve plus one’

Stirred up letters in words that flow

And in ‘conversation’, ‘voices rant on’

 

An antigram can be similar,

But only when in opposition

United untied, be restful or fluster;

A real fun funeral, silent – listen

 

Wordplay excites a logophile

But beware of logomania

Count your syllables in exile

Thou bohemians in Transylvania

 

Jackson Davies