Royalties for Parenthesis

dedicated to sacagrapas.





Forgive my interludes
Personal page breaks in sentences
Instead of thinking linearly,
I think in thick stratums
separate echelons of assessment.
I dress myself one sock at a time,
yet very slowly with each garment.

(Parenthetically escorting a phrase is,
in a sense, procrastinating the next section of a sentence.
As a literary device, parenthesis allow a sentence to linger –
in life, parenthesis are the ‘Boondoggles of Dawdling’)

Easily sidetracked,
I use Pac-man as a sad distraction
to (figuratively) defer my tasks to subsequent
positions in syntax.

I promise,
I’ll mow the lawn,
right after several commas, a dash
and quite possibly
an inadvertent semi-colon.

& after that, I’ll pay my debt
to the person who invented the parenthesis –
the devisor of these deviant lines

I owe him much more than any other ‘Punctuation Progenitor’

I attribute my side-speak and
lack of grammatical concentration to this inventor.

I paraphrase myself with these elliptical hugs:
what unfurls to me through renditions,
to others, is covered in coagulated words.
I puncture my life
to find undulations in time –
to breath between the lines.

Though they don’t serve their intended purpose:
(clarification for strangers)
It is the parenthesis I favor.