"semicolons" poems
My periods turn to semicolons
My suicide notes to poetry
My goodbyes became hellos
The blades turn to sunflowers
And the bullets, a rose
My heart still is broken
But the pieces have been found
Death isn’t for me anymore
What is, in the here and now
I still don’t feel enough
But I am alive
And that’s enough to say
Today is not the day I die.
Nov 15, 2019
Nov 15, 2019 at 2:14 PM UTC
They print their lives on a price tag,
Those big fat numbers,
All they do is brag.
My daughter’s a neurosurgeon,
Graduated from Johns Hopkins,
Saving lives by the hundreds.
My son a number-crunching accountant,
A career that keeps his wallet thick,
And his pockets filled.
They wonder what I do,
I tell them I work with words.
They gasp,
Eyes widen.
I tell them that,
I can count the spaces between adjacent letters in a word,
String words together to build a sentence,
Layer each sentence above another like bricks,
Place a single powerful mark of punctuation in between,
The glue that holds the bricks intact and forms a wall.
A wall of stanzas,
Connected by commas and semicolons.
A wall of paragraphs,
Big enough to block numbers out.
Because words fill souls while numbers fill pockets.
Words are immeasurable.
Infinite.
Nov 8, 2018
Nov 8, 2018 at 11:22 AM UTC
They say a semicolon is used by an author
when they could’ve ended a sentence,
but chose not to.
In a way, we’re all authors,
writing our stories out as the days go on and on,
as they fade from as golden as a crown,
to as dark as a melanistic fawn.
You see, I’m the author of my life.
I had the choice to force a period to the end of a few sentences
as my short life moved forward on countless occasions,
to stop the clock from ticking,
the heart from beating,
but no.
Because my story is far from done.
I will forever keep adding semicolons until my pen runs out of ink,
or until I can’t find the courage to keep on writing.
I have more fights to keep fighting,
mountains to keep climbing,
a million lies to tell, and a million sorry’s to
bandage the hurt,
a thousand kisses to receive from strangers
and family and friends alike
until the word “suicide”
is nothing but a fading page in my life story.
And if I ever want to add a period,
such as when I’m when I’m feeling as blue
as the eyes of the boy who shattered my heart into pieces,
I’ll remember the semicolon,
and how my short little story doesn’t need to end just yet,
now does it?
Jan 15, 2015
Jan 15, 2015 at 4:48 PM UTC
If you were literature
I'd tattoo you all over me
and let you seep through my skin
filling my veins with your words.
There are a lot of pieces that make up the English language:
capitals, semicolons, that ******* Oxford comma
but you,
you give english a definition.
Love, when you speak to me
I see the word bubbles levitating above your head
pinning down each sentence with fragments of your voice
your lips form stories,
the kind I actually like reading
the poems that leave me wanting more
and trust me
I DO WANT MORE.
But I'm Dr. Suess
and you are Shakespear.
I'm sorry, I'm not what you deserve
that my lines are crooked
and pages wrinkled
that you deserve heavenly white sheets
to share the curvature of your letters with
If only I could hold the spiral notebook that is you
caress your leather cover
I would whisper all the definitions
inscribed in my brain associated with your existence,
trying to untangle the string of words you knotted.
But reality isn't written.
I cannot serenade you with my words
you will forever be on top of this modern caste system
and there are no ladders
how can I talk to you at a football game
when you're the one on the field
that today is survival of the fittest,
if someone were to take you into their arms
it would boost their reputation,
but you are not my reputation
You are the language I want to speak
You are the lyrics to every song
You are all my favorite words.
And yes, I may just be the
routinely period at the end of your sentences
and the chances of being with you shouldn't even be considered
"chances"
but since someone such as you exists,
I can promise.
I can promise you
all these imperfect sweet nothings
until my pen runs out of ink.
Always.
Oct 13, 2014
Oct 13, 2014 at 11:58 PM UTC
So, yeah.
This would all have been a lot easier
If I didn't have the heart of a
Poet.
But I'll say this: Please love to learn,
So we can have *** with
Semicolons in as suggestive a
********* as they would imply. I know
I lost my innocence to an
Adjective, but didn't we all?
There's no room for jealousy in
Poetry,
We just rhyme and give the rhyme
Time to define, and aline with the
Rhythm to create a devine
Relaxationary artpiece to be consumed
By any reader who would find the
Time to entwine with a sentence
Or line, and use'em to maybe just
Describe the feeling of a hand
On the face of a man as myself, who
Has written so much of the things one
Can touch, that he looks at the world
As a man that a girl
Can tell: *Look at me, and say all
You can see is the face of Eternity.*
I am that man, with a pen in his hand,
And you could say it, but I surely
Know it: My body's a worker's.
My soul is a poet's.
Feb 28, 2015
Feb 28, 2015 at 8:59 PM UTC
Growing up never comes when you expect it:
It's when you realize that the suicide note under your mattress
Probably has a few too many commas where semicolons should be,
And a little too much emphasis on the last four years of your life-
Missed due dates, flunked exams, and friendships that were supposed to be forever.
It's when you figure out that the boy you spent your freshman year of college worrying about
Never even knew the name of your favorite book,
Or anything else that really mattered.
It isn't something you can predict, or prepare for-
It isn't a sudden shift of priorities that all of a sudden appear
Somewhere in your subconscious, making it a lot easier to get up at 9am for a statistics class
That you're inevitably going to fail.
It isn't anything you do that will change, but rather
A shift inside of you that slowly shakes your entire being.
Youth is only beautiful until it's corrupted,
By the sultry hands of time, beckoning you forward when all you ever wanted to do was hide.
It slowly seeps down into the darkest corners of your mind,
Swallowing up all that innocent ambition
Flung upon you in the fifth grade by a board of indifferent teachers
Who decided to deem you gifted, introducing you to a world of knowledge
Too fascinating to mingle with the uncertainty of responsibility.
There's something frightening about growing old,
Maybe it's because you spent one too many hours of your childhood
Pretending to be someone else- caught up in a storybook world
Full of daydreams and simplicity, too one dimensional for reality.
It's not that it goes away all of a sudden: all the premature doubt
And impulsive wishes of death, or something like it.
But rather, it takes a different form-
That which was once a big red ball full of passionate emotions,
Has deflated, leaving you with only a faint residue of what you used to feel.
Maybe, you got your wish after all- something had to die, you know,
In order for you to carry on without losing your mind.
It's a sad paradox, this sequence of living,
As intuition slowly deteriorates, and common sense
Slinks in, in its premeditated, yet lackluster manner,
And before you know it, you're not a kid anymore.
Peter Pan flew the coop years ago, but Neverland still remains,
A testimony to all the lost childhoods of the ones
Too eager to lay their stake in the land of milk and honey.
Jul 8, 2013
Jul 8, 2013 at 3:02 PM UTC
Life was void.
It’s she,
Opened the curly braces
Of my life;
My heart,
Imbibed the input –
Stream of her smiles;
The output – “<3 <3”
Got into an infinite loop
On the soul’s own console;
Sensing the love in return,
Jumped to the function – Life:
The Life with various parameters –
Joy, sorrow, warm, pain
Passed through a switch..
That returned “Love” on every case;
Life was full of snickers
At the mistakes of semicolons;
Making the bytes of sweet memories
Giga bytes to zetta bytes;
Now, the time,
As good code must,
Terminating with a graceful
End, Kissing her, Love!
Jun 12, 2020
Jun 12, 2020 at 1:16 AM UTC
You are my life's apostrophe
The part that has always been missing in me
You're right where the hyphen used to be-
You are my life's apostrophe
Once a question mark was all I had?
And commas dominated my soul,
Semicolons; separated my dreams
And the ellipse was firmly in control...
Then you placed your brackets around my [heart]
Your braces around my {soul}
Your parentheses surround my (dreams)
You're the exclamation mark in my life so droll!
Jun 10, 2015
Jun 10, 2015 at 3:27 AM UTC
Stop arbitrarily replacing commas with semicolons. Stop it.
Thanks everybody!
Oct 30, 2012
Oct 30, 2012 at 12:30 PM UTC
dear —,
this is not divinity-
no empty pillowcase cape can make you fly
no lipstick can make you beautiful no girl can make you girl no
boy can’t make you boy
no night time prayers can make you god
girl,
you can’t hate yourself into a revolution
or love yourself into a label
boy,
bi-
child.
binary gendered thing
bipolar botched up baby with hit hard head
bisexual? still denying: gay **** queer ***** ***** *****
bi.
j,
this is no caution tape finish line-
no period can finish your seesaw story,
child,
sadness sometimes stretches like
semicolons or wet cement
flowing through this blood, waiting for the moment to harden
to cave you into yourself
to sink into nose too wide, heart too big, space
too much
you growing soul,
with samson strength put all
in two places
just because that ****** pillowcase can
catch your tears doesn’t mean
you will always be only to catch
You,
stand.
have you prayed your own salvation so much you’ve forgotten how it feels to
open your eyes
?
held yourself long enough your back can’t crack open again
?
searched solutions for phantoms so you can only see yourself problem
?
have you written so many poems that you expect me finished
here?
•••
darling,
not every poem has a conclusion
not every poem needs one.
and not every person is prose
where the solution wraps itself into a bow
you can’t keep conflict with yourself until it does
love,
sometimes the answer will pass through
falling failing chests and
pressed pastor palms
sometimes the answer isn’t prewritten
picture book in black and white/boy and girl
sometimes it’s You
somewhere in between-
Dec 24, 2018
Dec 24, 2018 at 7:36 PM UTC
In a sea of people I search for you.
I have seen you in so many ways and have loved you in all of them.
I have stepped on pebbles and rocks to reach you.
You are the reason I breath, until I am breathless.
I reach out my finger to the universe and you are within my reach.
My finger ripples the universe piercing the surface of this reality.
Not my imagination this feeling.
Time makes no disappearance of my emotion.
I have said aloud you are my soul mate.
Put it to words on paper.
Endless semicolons.
My past is a whirlwind of pain, and regrets.
Yet the present has come.
My search is no longer in continuum.
All my doubts have come to fruition.
My epiphany has blinded me.
Mar 13, 2016
Mar 13, 2016 at 9:10 AM UTC
I feed my appetite with your voice. Your fricatives pirouette on my tongue. Each sibilant hangs on my teeth, then slides off and leaves its wax to pile up in my throat. I cough it up and collect it in a jar. It sits on the shelf in my basement and becomes familiar with the musty cloak of yesterday’s wet laundry. On the shelf, there are jars of swollen strawberries and gritty half-skulls of pears, blackberries like bundles of balloons. But in your jar, suspended in their own sugary liquid, are ripened vowels that arabesque when I give the jar a shake. I wipe the damp film off the metal lid with my thumb. Now I’m sitting in bed at 2:00 a.m., scooping your words from their glass house with a sticky index finger, speckled with seeds, semicolons, ellipses. Each dig gets me closer to your older, sweeter language–closer to what I’ve been craving. The last drops cling to the jar’s lip until I tilt it to mine, and I’m full-bellied, staring at an empty jar. In the bathroom, I slide a finger in my mouth until it reaches my throat and the words come up and fill the toilet and overflow onto the floor, puddle around my crooked toes and stain the linoleum.
Jul 29, 2013
Jul 29, 2013 at 4:44 PM UTC
No matter where we go,
What we are doing,
Or how we are doing it,
Our lives are sentences;
They are ongoing poetry lines,
Followed by commas and semicolons,
For a semicolon symbolizes where a sentence could've ended,
But didn't.
Our commas show us that we have unfinished business,
And remind us not to overlook the details.
So we go on,
Sitting in silence,
Shouting in anger,
And laughing with joy.
Pen in hand,
We are words in the wind,
Written freely from scarred hands,
We fly against the wind,
letting the sentences grow,
and our lives push on,
in our untitled poems.
May 18, 2014
May 18, 2014 at 11:13 PM UTC
The popularity of ten word poems
is more frustrating than the excessive use of exclamation points. Vonnegut may have thought of semicolons to be transvestites, but a readily available exclamation is the patron at a restaurant asking which farm the free range eggs have come from. To which you respond politely, while pinching your thigh. And the ten word poem is far beyond the measure of either punctuation. Those ten words are the publicly shared suicide note, crying for help, and seeking validation in the form of a digital thumbs up.
Jun 22, 2015
Jun 22, 2015 at 9:22 AM UTC
so, here i sit, having read that semicolons are a ******** tool - im only a partial ******* so, its admissable. in a bar drunk, sass'd, white bitch'd, hot as ever-living hell, hoping for a saxophonist. white ******* off bike lock keys in the bathroom as the door is attempted to be opened; "Sorry, we were ******* splurted, what an excuse; white ***** on a bike lock key - protection from theft, i guess. almost out of tobacco, yet i feel i can sustain, excuse me, remain. "i cant believe you did that, ***** crystal." (not what you think (totally what i think)) ambient psychedelia and a saxophonist (shes been mentioned) wailing, wail, whaling; expunge that Conscious ocean as if you were a Japo. yeah, racial slurs racial slurs. im told its 11.55 post on the 7th, but i am quite aware thats a lie. (most knowledge is (vindication symplified and unerred) unaware of what is being typed anymore) ..
Nov 28, 2012
Nov 28, 2012 at 12:26 PM UTC
The city of lunatics
Awake
Snatching semicolons
Left on pavements
Of incomplete poems
Over mouths pregnant with scattered letters
Wrapping singed skin
In dots and full stops
With loveless chokes writ on their faces
Lost in bruised
Sleep
May 2, 2018
May 2, 2018 at 9:00 AM UTC
I still reread our messages
As if the spaces in between our sentences
Would suddenly produce new words
It was like waiting for flowers to bloom in an eternal winter
I checked every period making sure that you were done saying what you wanted to say
And maybe you'd want to turn your periods into semicolons – your sentences may have ended but your thoughts haven't
I was trying to find something, anything
In the string of words we told each other
Staring at each "I love you"
Trying to figure out if maybe I did something wrong
I had no one to blame for your decision but myself
I couldn't even blame you, I loved you too much
In the sea of I love yous and sweet nothings
I was hoping to find when it exactly stopped
When you stopped feeling the same
When our love became one-sided and you left me hanging
When you let go and I was still holding on
Why didn't I notice that you were gone
If we wrote to each other in Chinese characters I wouldn't be surprised that I misunderstood you somewhere in the stroke of a letter
But we spoke the same language and loved the same things
We went to the same places and made plans about similar things
You made me believe that the language of love isn't French but it was whatever we spoke, whatever we felt,
yet it felt like your words passed through google translate so much so that it turned into a language only you could comprehend
If humans only use 10% of their brain
Well believe me I'm racking my brain so hard trying to understand why I just wasn't good enough for you that I may be using 10.1% of my brain already
Maybe I just missed something
Maybe we lost something along the way and I was too naive to notice
Maybe it's the fact that I loved you after all your mistakes and I tried to understand you like you were my favorite song in a foreign language and I just had to sing along
Maybe I was too blinded
By my own love
Mar 21, 2015
Mar 21, 2015 at 12:22 PM UTC
In school, I was always getting spoken to about the length of my sentences; I used semicolons more than anyone else my teacher had ever met and he always asked me why I didn't just end the sentence and begin again; I always told him that I was scared to end one if I wasn't sure it was finished yet; what if it wanted another chance? What if it was ready to start again? I wrote an essay in which the entire introduction was one long sentence, it went on for two pages and I had to rewrite it three times because it was not concise enough. I grew worried that I'd end up the same way the rest of my life; what if I was always too scared to end things because I wasn't sure if I would be able to start from scratch? What if I held on to one thing for too long and lost the chance of another one hatching and what if I never learned how to start fresh? I was always used to starting over, but it's different when you're older. You don't start over with the same white heart, you start over, carrying the bruises you got from fighting for years and you start over knowing that any move could be the one that ends your sentence and you start over knowing you're creating run-on after run on but you don't care as long as your words have somewhere safe to go; you don't care as long as they know they're welcome there, because god knows they weren't anywhere else.
Jul 8, 2016
Jul 8, 2016 at 10:30 PM UTC
The rain fell in semicolons that morning.
A small pattering and then a downpour,
Its vacillation was music to our eardrums.
All across my face were commas, marking tear trails
Which had long ago dried in the silence of sleep.
And in your eyes I saw the dreaded question marks
That I knew would come at dawn;
Should we have been more afraid?
What made us feel so empty?
Why did love
Sometimes hurt?
The ellipses poured out of my fingertips
As I brushed away your bangs.
My kisses were soft and punctuated periods
Across your forehead and nose and cheeks
Hoping to end the conversation, end the fear
In my heart.
I hoped that we could go together into the tomorrows
That were anxiously awaiting us
Two halves of parentheses,
Making one whole.
May 7, 2011
May 7, 2011 at 6:28 AM UTC
let's make fluid poetry with our bodies
worthy of even the deepest sighs
make me tell you a story
of exclamations
and semicolons
guide my body
as you do a pen
into whispering commas
dashes
and ellipses
k.n
Jul 10, 2013
Jul 10, 2013 at 12:44 AM UTC
I do not believe in heaven or hell, but I believe
in whatever vindictive god left me here
like an unfinished sentence: incomplete, unenclosed, trailing
commas and semicolons and dangling prepositions
in my wake, tethered to nothing but my own beginnings
in a world obsessed with the way things end—I did not ask
for answers, and yet they were given to me;
I did not ask to be dragged down and anchored to a single story,
trapped between well-meaning parenthetical smiles (“put a period there,”
they say, “and begin a new sentence"—
but how can I start over when I have only just begun?)
Sep 29, 2013
Sep 29, 2013 at 2:34 PM UTC
theres something so final about a period
which is as it should be
commas always get in the way
coming and going like anxious insects
trying to make themselves important
as they scatter over a page
already overrun with too many words
question marks have a slightly
swooping profile curve just above
a period
theyre kind of elegant
they remind me of a swan
with a regal attitude
i saw once on a pretty pond
parentheses embrace words like **** curves
and brackets are like steel gray bookends
fencing words in
exclamation points are so abrupt
and rude and angry
like an outburst
in a classroom
like fireworks
in a funeral parlor
dont mess with them
they mean business
hyphens dashes colons semicolons
apostrophes
and quotation marks
that surround what we say
and dont forget the ellipses that
take the place of
words we omit
sometimes i like to write stories and poems
with no punctuation no capitalization
no grammatical rationale whatsoever
dare i ask
how did i do
Oct 27, 2015
Oct 27, 2015 at 3:23 PM UTC
I guess the leaves are on the lawn now,
like Fall always comes and thank God for October
but too many grandparents have died this month, and
on the first day, the rain keeps
coming.
And I have been
obliterated by simple things,
like October or
the coming and going of people.
I have been
shocked silent into this room,
I am still never
sure of what left there is to say;
there are too many people that I have left with semicolons
and no following independent clauses
or independent thought.
Shake me the most awake,
or I will blanch and putter and
scream in the morning.
How nightmares upon nightmares
upon daymares
have thrown me for something—
a loop maybe? A figure-eight?
———
I have always
wondered why we collect shells on the beach.
(I know I do it too, but)
they once held life
and I am wondering why we celebrate
the shell of things.
———
I am not sure how to end this,
but in the ever so common way of ending
without really an ending at all.
Oct 1, 2012
Oct 1, 2012 at 2:06 PM UTC
**** everything. I'm going to sleep.*
I don't need this
I don't need you
You and your pernicious words
You send them my way like bullets
Piercing with each period
Cutting with each comma
Turning semicolons into semiautomatics
Feb 6, 2013
Feb 6, 2013 at 8:59 PM UTC
Gorgeous fruit,
You are the mercury and
I the ***** slanted surface;
Faults in the flesh cry
“Scarlet ants
To fill my dreadful purpose!”
My little voice that steals from the page
Can fill the singing water.
But I wonder often
If all my breath
Is in accordance with
That great tome
At the end of all our days
Which instructs us
In the proper use of semicolons.
Until we know, I bar my
Wanton lips.
Get up and bar my wantonness
That I should
Live in the sands I am
Allotted.
O despairing syllabus!
Can you- will you care to number
On the murmuring calendar all
The days you must
Wait for me to clasp
The iron bar?
Ay, with my teeth set as far
Apart as my shoulders
And my very animus
Sewn into the college ruled
Notebooks, records, loose-leafs
With looser thoughts.
What I would do without
The seventy
Anticipatory footsteps in the snow
Might stop the very
Pull
Of land and ship
And pull out every
Stop
From under our deck.
Gorgeous fruit, I ask
You to pull the pencil
From my desk and entice
Me once more from my bed.
Mar 22, 2010
Mar 22, 2010 at 2:21 PM UTC