Knife to a Gunfight of Conjunctions
 |
| AI image generated by the Bytesized Studio |
Knife to a Gunfight of Conjunctions
I arrived armed with a semicolon; sleek, understated,
the pocketknife of punctuation—
and found myself in a back-alley brawl of and, but, therefore.
They were packing clauses.
Dependent ones.
The kind that travel in packs and smell faintly of inevitability.
I flicked my blade—clean, precise—
ready to carve a sentence down to bone.
But “however” cocked its eyebrow, “meanwhile” checked the exits,
and “because” loaded a chamber full of reasons.
I lunged at “and”—the repeat offender—
only to discover it was hydra-headed,
sprouting more logic every time I tried to cut it clean.
I thought minimalism would save me—
one clean line, a tidy point—
but this was a war of accumulation.
Bullets of nuance ricocheted off my tidy thesis.
In the end, I lowered my little blade and holstered my pride.
Turns out, sometimes you bring a knife to learn how not to cut.
Next round,
I’ll come armed with listening—
and maybe a well-placed “yet.”
-----
The fine troublemakers over at dVerse Poets Pub tossed out a prompt: write a poem using only phrases—no complete sentences allowed. If you’re curious (or feeling brave), you can still find the prompt.
This drove me absolutely batty.
A phrase, according to Oxford Languages, is “a small group of words standing together as a conceptual unit, typically forming a component of a clause.” Translation: it’s not a full sentence. No subject-verb handshake. No grammatical closure. And the rule was simple: no complete sentences in the poem.
I had fun with it—for about twelve minutes.
Long enough to write the poem, Soup Fork at the Banquet of Verbs, polish it, read it aloud twice like a proud parent, tweak it again, post it, and share it around. And then—almost immediately—I hated it.
Because here’s the thing: I’m the guy constantly nagging my fellow poets—especially the poor souls in my workshop group who endure my lectures—that poems are built from sentences. Sentences deserve grammar. Syntax. Structure. Punctuation. The bones of language.
Learn the rules first. Then break them with style. Otherwise you’re not transcending craft into art—you’re just making a mess. And, respectfully, I am not E. E. Cummings.
So a poem that was basically a stylish pile of incomplete sentences was… irritating. Deeply irritating.
Until someone looked at it and said, “Yeah, but those would make great titles.”
This is the first in a series, lol.
-----
I would love to know what you thought about this piece.
Please consider leaving a comment.
Comments
Post a Comment