A Typewriter with Tourettes by Irena Szirtes

Tippity-tap and clickety-clack, the whirr as my cylinder

     ricochets back, one word per second to end of each... ding! Once work seemed forever - words forming, emerging,

     jumping and jumbling to dance into place,

 a slipping and sliding and super-colliding of

      letters and concepts and sounds sweeping space... ding!

Commas and hyphens, apostrophe items, tumbling and jousting  and printing the air, streaming and bounding and speaking and sounding, rounding up sentences, ugly and fair!

       The fickle faint-hearted and easily parted typed

letters to lovers they’d leave in the lurch,

       and manuscripts mountained as authors and vicars

fountained their musings for readers or church;

       fantastical creatures burst from my spool,

my wheel spun a subplot, detective or ghoul,

       then theses and recipes, whimsies, or just to tease,

 letters that whispered scandal and sleaze, letters that insult,

      letters that please...  forever imprinting, forever fast forming, swiftly words gathered like dust in the breeze!

      Conveying a montage of pounds and percentage, equations,

persuasions,  philosophy ravings, raining from brain-waves

     of lightning-fast minds;

   imagery leapfrogging on to the paper, metaphors

         muddled and edited later –

  then good for the nation, abstruse litigation

empowered long words in showers and herds

     to command and establish, without intonation!

A speech after dinner, or fine recitation,

    the frown of an author, her swift inspiration, yet

  pinged and fast-fingered and prodded – no ‘please’ -

    beaten and bludgeoned with merciless ease,

 is it surprising this constant colliding of fingers

       and levers and qwerty-type keys might

cause a typewriter who reigned, now beset,

     to burst out of protocol, provoke Tourettes?

I’m bouncing, I’m tilted, I’m thrown out of kilter,

 complex and confused, a curmudgeonly crank -

      once I was all of those thoughts, now abandoned,

done with, forgotten, devoid of all thanks!

    Now iPhones and laptops declare, ‘We’re the best!’

 shriek notifications and trigger Tourettes -  

      I shudder and judder as clicks build to clatter,

My spool jiggles all of my parts into natter,

    my bells ring and rock, keys twitch and unlock,

my reverse button bounces, I cannot hold back

     from typing out swearwords -  rattle and whack

go my levers as faster than fingers I go,

      gaining momentum and lost in the flow,

the flow of those swearwords which might never stop...  ding!

    I jolt round the attic, I jangle, I thunder,

I waggle the walls till its occupants wonder

    what is the clickety-clackety-rattle...

Rats? Is it squirrels? Vain is their guess:

      it’s the tics and out-bursting ebullient cursing,

 a whacky and wonderful wanton word fountain –

     a typewriter with Tourettes... ding!