Thursday, June 14, 2007

punctuation

once in seventh grade I think our teacher gave us a page of words without punctuation or capital letters and we had to figure out where the sentences were and how to make sense of the words the words could be divided up in more ways than one sort of like how my life feels right now when unemployment and alzheimers and marriage and schnauzers and friends and stopping at the post office all run together and I’m not sure which one starts the sentence and which one ends it whether the night is sandwiched between two days or the day between two nights or how time flies whether or not you’re having a good time with my second cup of coffee I’m waking up a bit here in the coffee shop maybe that’s why I’m typing so fast and watching the lady with her baby who is here every week with her friend for her afternoon out of the house and the baby is vocalizing like a rabid soprano not the TV kind maybe she likes being out of the house as well who knows how life gets punctuated certainly not in passive voice we punctuate life I think without having a chance to see the whole paragraph or even the whole sentence before we have to decide on a period or comma or when we’re really feeling adventurous a semi-colon how I long for some parentheses from time to time but they don’t seem to keep as much out as I would like I didn’t expect them to be translucent they look so strong on the page a period of time is not a full stop it has room to move around while I figure out where to go next then again maybe I’ll just sit here awhile longer and listen to the baby she has a grammar all her own punctuating the air with untranslatable exclamations I wonder what would happen if I tried a few of those myself the guy behind me would spew his soup and I would be asked to leave and I have to go home anyway time for dinner new recipe

Peace,
Milton

7 comments:

Beth said...

ilovethiskindoflikewritingwithout
spacesitisveryexcitingandhardto
trainyourthumbtostayoffthespacebar
knowwhatimean?

i love seeing life through your eyes!

Anonymous said...

when my parents kept my first cat went I went off to Costa Rica he would "type" me letters with no spaces or punctuation -- and some things misspelled!. Anyway, your post is a delight.

(P.S., I tagged you for the 8 Random Things meme...)

Anonymous said...

I love it!

i mean i love it

Cynthia said...

How charming!

kingfisher said...

I just wandered onto your blog from gordon atkinson's, Milton. I like your poetry and the things you write about. I have never thought of the voice of God as a child's voice. Many thanks, Lisa

Anonymous said...

I have to say...I really hate it when my life is so run together like that...I am getting better at taking a breath...or a space...or whatever to make me stop and "smell the roses"...I feel much more together when I do that!!! If books were written the way your blog was written today..we would read them much faster. : )

Anonymous said...

visiting from poetry thursday and saw this little run on sentence poem here at the bottom; life is like that; and we breathe and move on and there are so few moments when we are not thinking.
enjoyed the title of your blog; yours is an important message to get out there