Arguing With a Comma

Arguing With a Comma

The last thing I remember was arguing with a comma like it owed me money.

The desk lamp burned its small, inquisitive sun over a crime scene of drafts—

pages crossed out like bad excuses,

metaphors limping away from the scene with their hats in their hands.

Being a writer is mostly moving furniture inside a sentence

until the couch of meaning stops blocking the only window.

I have compared love to weather, grief to an unreturned library book,

hope to a stray dog who chooses you—

and still the page blinks back, white as a dentist’s grin.

Sometimes a poem arrives like a gentleman caller, hat tipped, bearing figs and thunder.

More often it’s a raccoon in the attic, scratching at 3 a.m., demanding to be named.

I chase lines the way children chase kites—convinced the string leads somewhere holy.

I have mistaken ego for inspiration, confused applause with oxygen,

believed a clever stanza could sandbag a flood.

But the truth of it is quieter.

Writing is excavation with a teaspoon.

It is lowering a bucket into the well of your own ribs

and hauling up whatever water agrees to rise.

Some days I strike flint—a spark, a sentence that stands upright like it has knees.

Other days I sweep the workshop of language,

finding only splinters and a stubborn nail of doubt.

Still, I return.

I sit before the blank field.

I bury my hands in its snow.

I wait for the fox of an image to step lightly across it.

The last thing I remember was arguing with a comma like it owed me money.

The first thing I remember is being under something.

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Shared with those Poetics over at DVerse Poets Pub.

This poem ends with the first line of a semi-autobiographical novel by Charles Bukowski, Ham on Rye

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©2026 Christopher Reilley 

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