Punctuation Or Not

[rayheinrich]

Poetry should have no rules. It is poetry. ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ...

If poetry has no rules then:
1. Poetry doesn't have to be poetry.
2. Everything, something, barelything, and nothing is and isn't poetry.
3. My grandmother has wheels and is a 1935 Duesenberg Phaeton.


If My Grandmother Had Wheels - Marilyn Cavicchia

In my blood, I’d go to the men’s room,
the bathroom at Sears, she said.
If pigs had wings, she’d be a streetcar,
she said, and I would have been a bus.

I smile at the Midwestern women. If my aunt
had balls like them, or the pioneer women
crossing the plains, she’d be a bicycle. I would
have been a bus, and we would bottle Paris.

This counterfactual thinking. It is fruitless
to speculate about counterfactual situations.
She’d be my uncle, my aunt; she’d wash
her feet in the sink if we could bottle Paris

and make a ham and cheese sandwich
as respectable Sears matrons flutter
their hands, their support knee-highs,
her feet in the sink. But it is fruitless,

this counterfactual speculation. Fruitless,
my uncle, my aunt, even my grandmother,
though I suspect she has bottled Paris,
wagoned it all the way home.