Punctuation and Poetry
Why can’t you be a poet and a writer in the same moment?
I am not trying to master English. The nuances of passive voice or where those commas actually go. I know that capitols start the sentence and periods cut everything off. Or so they drill into you at school. Don’t make the thought too long and don’t make it too real and don’t make it too drawn out. I am not writing to master English or make teachers proud or meet the strict rules of the dictionary.
I am here to break rules. To throw thoughts together like baking soda and vinegar and see what comes together. Ignore your punctuation, your periods and commas. Smush sentences and subjects and feelings in a mumbled line of tumbling letters. The perfectly placed period has never caused someone to question their beliefs, to embrace their feelings, to change their mind. I am merging prose and poetry, a mastery of words with a command of logic. To take feelings and crush them into a dense paragraph of words that spill into each other, making sense without stopping to take breaks or breaths.
Poetry does not have to be in stanzas. Prose doe not have to have a beginning, a middle, and an end. Sometimes the words wander. Sometimes poetry weaves itself into an argument and the scientific can be best explained in the short sentences that best make sense in the hidden place in your chest.
Screw the rules and the limits. I want to change the world with words. Write paragraphs as good as any poem and poems worth quoting. It has always been the words, not the punctuation that holds power.
