The other day I asked my daughter, ‘Can you pass me the thing that opens the door?’ The word key having eluded me. The idea of fluency interests me – and whether we can ever claim fluency in any language. Words and articulacy are power, but words escape me all the time; not only words that I can’t recall or names I’ve forgotten but words I mishear or miss altogether because of my deafness in my left ear. Also, listening to my mother speaking Danish for two weeks every year when my grandparents visited from Copenhagen was fascinating, yet alienating as I couldn’t understand my mother’s tongue. Three members of my family suffered with dementia and journeyed from fluency to the ultimate inarticulacy. To what extent language builds or diminishes identity is a preoccupation. How Danish am I, not speaking Danish? How Deaf am I with my clumsy attempts at British Sign Language? I have to work hard to listen and this requires me to place you to my right side, to watch your lips, to watch your hands, to watch your gestures. How can form not matter? To understand what you say, I must attempt to control our interrelated physical space. Of course, I often fail and confusion, mis-interpretation and annoyance, as well as humour, are by-products. My poems reflect my obsession with form and the physical space that words occupy on the page. Attempting to ‘hang onto’ sound means aids, such as rhyme, are appreciated. Escaping from noise into silence and reading means lines, phrases and fragments from books are often more keenly heard than what is being said to me in everyday life. However, language is as much visual as it is aural. I am excited by the appearance of words, their material quality and the condensed narratives of names. Working as a freelance journalist specialising in technology gives me a level of fluency in esoteric acronyms and a specialist language which masks technophobia. Alternative perceptions offer a relief from the tyranny of pseudo-articulacy. Only politicians’ speeches pretend otherwise. The multiplicity and multifariousness of language, communication and understanding means every interpretation is possible, and possibly wrong. But some fun and perhaps progress towards empathy can be had playing with these ideas along the way.