A gnat crawls across the pages
of my poetry book.
Traversing the off-white field,
it resembles a walking comma,
its animated message,
“don’t stop –
take a breath
and move on..”

As this pied piper of punctuation
heads for the margin,
other workaday marks
lift themselves off the page
and parade to the edge –
mites of colons and periods,
snaking question marks,
exclamation points,
kinsmen commas,
tadpole twins of quotation.

Letters follow suit –
the vowels, free agents of sound,
crowd off the corners.
Consonant blends,
more than the sum of their parts,
leave for another place
to test the teeth and tongue.

Some remaining words
clamber off in clusters,
hoping to invent new context –
on a sports page:
“Bears whip Falcons;”
instructions on building a bicycle,
recipes for sweet potato pie.

A few phrases, some top-heavy,
are the last to leave,
looking to find employment
in some plagiaristic work.

All that remain are the spaces,
separating only each other,
and the title, bold and self-important,
heralding, governing nothing.

10/04/2001

Posted on 10/04/2001
Copyright © 2026 Bruce W Niedt