boyfriends drudgery and piss

[heslopian]

To me a poem should be all or nothing when it comes to punctuation. A lone mark looks sloppy and inconsistent. The point of full stops and commas is to indicate pauses, establishing rhythm, but some poems just use line breaks for this. The American poet ee cummings (he wrote his name like that, without capitals), for instance, eschewed punctuation altogether, like in this famous piece:

the boys i mean are not refined

the boys i mean are not refined
they go with girls who buck and bite
they do not give a fuck for luck
they hump them thirteen times a night

one hangs a hat upon her tit
one carves a cross on her behind
they do not give a shit for wit
the boys i mean are not refined

they come with girls who bite and buck
who cannot read and cannot write
who laugh like they would fall apart
and masturbate with dynamite

the boys i mean are not refined
they cannot chat of that and this
they do not give a fart for art
they kill like you would take a piss

they speak whatever's on their mind
they do whatever's in their pants
the boys i mean are not refined
they shake the mountains when they dance