brokley

[Terri]

i've never had much luck
with punctuation.
i try
but it's like algebra
as soon as i stop thinking about it
it slips out of mind like -
a slippery thing

i can do contractions
and tell its from it's
it's when you start asking me,
"where does the comma go at
the end, inside or outside the
quotation marks?"
and what if the quotation should end
in a question, but then
it's the end of the sentence and
i want a period?

i once had a boss
restaurant owner
supposedly had a psychology degree
couldn't spell to save his life
i always wondered how he
ever graduated, he spelled
broccoli 'brokley'

i'm going to do what he did
and just wing it

[sasha]

A lot of these "rules" were made up by fusty, self-important editors (are you listening, Strunk & White?) and aren't really rules at all. I think your game plan is spot on - wing it!

"Each voter must bring their ID to the polling station." Grammatically incorrect? I suppose - "each voter" (singular), "their" (plural) - but it's not as stuffy as "his or her", it's perfectly clear, and it's becoming a widely accepted compromise for the lack of singular, genderless English personal pronoun...

(regarding your old boss - I've heard some otherwise technically savvy engineers make some pretty boneheaded & downright wrong assertions....)

[stilltrucking]

I cannot wing it so I limp along with back edits. I have read that it is no sin to limp

"What we cannot reach flying we must reach limping. . ."Beyond The Pleasure Principle"

nothing to do with your poem

but it reminded me of this ku.

judih wrote:

i've got commas
and apostrophes
never enough ooze

thanks for writing
I hang on every word you write
infriendship j

[judih]

an ooze ku!
thanks, jack

when there's nothing left to criticize
bring on the punctuation bots
inside/outside the box

[Terri]

judih your ku often set me down dreamy
thinking 'what did she just say?'

thank you, sasha and st. trucking

[mnaz]

BTW, I (honestly) need help on the subject (punctuation). It's kind of mysterious and hard to figure out.

[saw]

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/314-i- ... -one-of-my

I had a lot of dumbass bosses in my day....some stupid, some mean, some mean and stupid

my father told me that "down the point"...which meant the steelworkers from Bethlehem Steel at Sparrows Point....the dumbest guys, which meant the most dangerous, would be made foreman, so they couldn't directly kill a co-worker stuck with them for the day

nice musings

[saw]

nuthin' like brokley and cheezze

[stilltrucking]

The Pity of Punctuation

Hoard of words released like manic
spring with its quick gush blooms of bright
where endings have not even a small chance
life forever resurrecting itself without the monster
splotch which when shrunken to depressed
the psychoanalyst calls the period
of realization and the patient hangs on
for her dear however listless
existence like a hyphen at the end
of its rope searching for its dropped
letters like I wait and hold my breath
for my letter that the male carrier might bring
with the possible swerve of love
before any wall of stiff brackets
and the unforgiving is embedded
into the type you know the type

where false hope lies in the dash and never forget

the pun how could one for therein
lived the fun when it was lost inside
me as my body and all punctuation
was temporarily erased eight years ago
same as the symbol of eternity
in April that whore month
with its hoard of all that is
possible while the sun slowly pitched itself
into the lake and he left and suddenly

too many commas crawled in carrying
colons with their screaming litanies of lists
and question marks with WHYWHYWHY
on their small hooked spineless backs
and the parade would not stop

until finally the period did roll in so bleak
and yet what a tiny thing it was
as I began to feel the fade into
the seamless midnight sky
with my being given
no choice but to curve onto that dot
and disappear with it

http://connection.ebscohost.com/c/poems ... unctuation

[Arcadia]

it seems that first writings (in culture and in personal history) don´t care too much about pauses and segmentation ... they are more like a continuum in capital letters... . My fourth grade students this year seem also to have other priorities...

[mnaz]

Jeez, you'd think a restaurant owner would at least know how to spell brokaly!