Kerning

When you’re unfamiliar with a word, 
you look it up or it looks at you as if 

the context clues were tired of shedding 
the light without being the lime in it. I 

once heard a guy say: Meaning is taken 
for granted and never returned. And the 

sincerity in his voice made me believe 
he didn’t know how to release the guilt 

he collected throughout his life. I first 
heard the word kerning and thought: seed, 

something to do with spreading life, 
rather than the spacing between letters, 

but I suppose where one places typeface 
is a kind of planting. Two rounds sitting 

closest together and two straights erected 
farthest apart are most visually appealing 

because many a man have been seduced by 
bodies of symmetry. It’s a simple case of 

what catches the ideology, how the 
ascenders and descenders sway away 

from their base and would have you 
believe they’re content to be extensions 

but actually long to be letters of their 
own because that’s how it is sometimes, 

as we stretch our arms not as a form of
gasping but grasping.