Long
I can only experience the world (with satisfaction) through systematizing it into poetry…and when that systematizing falters, the poem becomes a song. The song becomes the Blues, and I find myself “ordered”. Formally, I wanted to replicate that trained repetition of life, with the inclusion of ellipses. The ellipses slow the poem down to model the snake dragging its body. Periods are meant to be false signs of relief, stopping long enough to give the illusion that the “lone loneliness” might be over. Commas, add to the anxiety and frustration until the false relief of the ellipses become a comfort. The only exclamation mark acts as an attempt to free both myself and the reader from the lull we’ve fallen into, from the repetition. I also wanted my punctuation to function like musical notes, telling the reader where they should take their time, where they should annunciate or speed up.