People

The word has been spelled differently.  The peple in Chaucer
Represent a complex class with raunchy, flexible banners of living color
Replacing the earlier pepul and the Popul Vuh.

As for the peeple who span the engravings, they look around them
Happily and defiantly and threateningly, surveyed in their turn
By reactionary anti-census takers, with pupilles, two eyes, like those

Of Peter the Hermit, mismatched and out of alignment, forced
Therefore to see and read two-dimensionally and truly.
When peiple sacrificed someone they called him a pipple

With contempt, and while he screamed, like prose, forced out
Of his apartment with his family and while the young children wept
There was a lot of laughter, and the payple wrote it down as journalism.

The silent o at the center of people, which is the whole meaning
Of modern English, as it proceeds towards the twenty-first
Century, is the tambourine that no one knows how to play.

Poem from The Printer's Error, reprinted with permission of Miami University Press, 2001.