Poetry presented at the Double Dialogues Art and Pain Exhibition

 

Myron Lysenko

A poem about the pain of punctuation
& the pain of feeling socially inadequate.

The Rise & Fall of the Apostrophe  (air comma) (for Billy Collins & Jordie Albiston)

the apostrophe’s misunderstood it’s constantly misused & abused & is either being ignored when it’s needed or poking its little nose in where it’s not wanted you can’t keep it down get it back into line where it first came from why did the first curious comma look up & decide to fly into the tops of letters leaving its friends lying punctuated below did it grow bored of the predictability of full stops & the calmness of the trinity of meditating ellipsis was it envious of the never-ending generosity of the colon & the nervous energy of question marks was it frightened by the paranoia of semi-colons & the weird dancing of exclamation marks maybe it was just frustrated with its traffic cop duties in a world full of speeding words refusing to slow down at some point the comma became ambitious & began to hang out with a wise old hyphen who taught it to stand in for any absent letters who’d rung in to the words to say they were off sick the hyphen named the air comma an apostrophe & introduced it to the gossiping twins the quotation marks & their friends the anarchist bracket brothers who enjoyed the apostrophe’s buoyant carefree personality & took it out with them on weekends where they caused havoc as they gate-crashed every party organized by the local sentences the apostrophe tried hard to become a letter but was regarded as an inferior type an imposter rising above its station it gradually turned away from all its friends & tried different drugs to keep itself high turning into the schizoid anxious wreck it is these days going about its work in its tired & careless hungover way , . / ? ’ " ; : - ... ! ` ~ ()