If we had gathered all our selves into one place
and said,
Let us make language in our own image,

We would have laid the phonemes out to yellow in the sun
and watched them shrivel until we could say,
A voiceless fricative before an approximant has a meaning
other than that of a velar nasal after a high vowel. But

We were unaware of choice.

Given a jumble of morphemes and millennia to sort them
we bumbled and slipped and sinned our way through
six thousand five hundred systems of clicks and liquids
to accidentally arrive in a century where a consonant cluster can occur
in an environment entirely outside meaning
based on where my tongue sits comfortably between my teeth.