’Tis the knights of short diction—just a single sound…
High-strung cords start a-stirring; the sound is not round.
The talking will come with emittance of air;
Mouth opens and wind’s upthrust from down in there.

’Tain’t sibilance vented in what will be said,
And fricatives ain’t wending out of their heads.
The tongue is not in a position to lap;
If so, there might be a morphemic mishap.

So taciturn are they that they never chatter,
So serious are they that they never natter.
When you meet them, there will be no need to clash
If you supplement their arboreal stash.

These chevaliers are the ones that we know
From a 1975 picture show.
Should you go a-wandering and they appear,
They’re not fixing to slay but will smite thee with jeers.

A potential danger if you’re in the sticks
Is listening to their slick linguistic shtik.
Your pusillanimity fills you with shame
As you pullback from the monosyllabic name.

A fast track; you dash back; your task, to be hidden
From awful, abusive talk that is unbidden.
But your ears will be scorched by what seems folderol;
They bash away, bash away with phonic maul.

These guys grievously wound you with incessant cries,
And they won’t let you pass, despite incessant tries.
You make to them an offering of a yew,
But they are scoffing, huffing, “That just won’t do!”

With such stress, you’re hard-pressed to be calm-aloof
As their tongues egress from the palatal roof.
In the funky forest where muggers abound,
Unplugged ears are buggered by this ugly sound,

Which doesn’t add up to an iambic foot—
Besides, metric examination is moot.
To surge onward and not be forced to turn track,
You must give them what they yearn for but in turn lack.

“Would you take a holly with real red rad berries?”
Their answer ensues: a resounding raspberry.
Noise holes of their mouths seems poised to voice a “No!”
But the N is followed by an I, not an O.

“If you wish to pass,” the leader screams, “bequeath
Some green you can easily seize from a heath!”
In a screeching tone that's deemed far from blubbery,
The leader decrees, “You’ll give us a shrubbery!”

They spurn your offer of blue ceramics, Delft,
So you head off to dredge for hedged organic pelf.
A shrubbery’s found; back to the knights you tread,
But they contradict what they’d recently said.

“The shrubbery’s good, no doubt, but it’s not worth
The work you’ve done jerking it out of the earth.
We’re no longer knights of one-syllable prose;
We’re now in echoic nonsensical throes.

“We’re the knights who say this dodecasyllable,
Though you may find this logo-dreck, uh, risible.
‘Ekke Ekke Ekke Ekke Ptang Zoo Boing!’ cite
We now!” Then you learn: with “it” them you can fight.