What happens when fantastic
becomes fan-fucking-tastic
was not something I considered
until I tried to learn Tagalog,
the f-bomb in this case an infix,
element that sounds vaguely criminal
but is old as fuck itself.
Motherfucker on the other hand’s
much younger — you low-down mother-
fuckers Sidney Wilson wrote to
the Tennessee Draft Board in 1918
can put a gun in our hands
but who can take it out? Black soldiers
like Pvt. Wilson fought in the Philippines
twenty years earlier & before that saved
Roosevelt’s skin at San Juan Hill.
Before the Spaniards they fought Indians:
Kiowa. Comanche: whose children were forced
to forget numu tekwapu — the Comanche
for Comanche — in English-only schools.
Tagalog agglutinates. Stems
glom tense & tone
like coconut flakes on rice balls.
Kain / eat becomes kumain / will eat
by subsuming um (in English a sound
of uncertainty). Mamatay / perish
fibrillates to mamamatay —
one day you will die.
The infix marks the shift: ma,
as though to go from death
the infinitive to death as future tense
one need only bury their mother.