“Comma”

Oct 9

There should be a comma here,

he said. And it made you want to

remove all the commas remove

all your clothes and dance around

naked with the poem in your hand

waving it around in the air singing

comma comma comma comma

while the other poets in the work-

shop clutched their pocketbooks

and pens and meh poems to their

caved-in craven chests your leap-

ing poem bungee jumping boing-

boing off the walls and ceiling cut-

ting the air with the cutting edge of

its lines like sickles like scythes like

live catenary wires whipping the dead

air of that bleak classroom kicking

fusty seemly sedentary poet butt

and you swinging from the killer last

line leaping singing windmilling right

out the door. But instead you said,

Yes, thank you, there should be,

and dryly inserted the comma with

your yellow-bellied number 2 pencil,

sat back and sighed with your slack

mouth open for more feedback.

Paul Hostovsky’s poems appear and disappear simultaneously—

voila! —and have recently been sighted in those places where they

pay you for your trouble with your own trouble doubled, and other

people’s troubles thrown in, which never seem to him as great as

his troubles, though he tries not to compare. He has no life and

spends it with his poems, trying to perfect their perfect

disappearances, which is the working title of his new collection,

which is looking for a publisher and for itself.

“To Work, When The World Breaks Your Heart”