I'm under orders from the period.
It's like that stop sign at the end of Hornby Road.
Run it and the punctuation cops
are on my tail.
Arid the comma makes me pause.
Oh how I need those pauses.
The apostrophe can be possessive
but sometimes it wants nothing more
than to warn me of a missing letter.
The exclamation mark makes a loud point.
I avoid it at all costs.
'There's the colon of course.
an unfortunate association with the human body.
And the semi-colon, though I know
no one who's bedeviled with one of those.
Quotation marks would be useful
if I ever found myself repeating
what somebody else said.
I never do.
Hyphens save me from spellcheck's wrath,
So make that spell-check.
Ellipses are a favorite of course.
Three periods, count them, three...
I run that stop sign.
And the next one. And the next.
I blow right through punctuation.
Not a cop in sight.
                        

Damn axe!
One blow,
one ringing echo,
and I shake like the tree
the blade just thumped.

No matter
where the axe strikes,
it always feels like
the latest chop 
is nearer than the last.

My branches tremble.
My bark cracks open.
My tears
run like sap.

For the woods 
are full of axe-men.
Forget the grindstone,
their cutting edge
is whetted on money.

Thunk. Thunk. Thunk.
One after the other.
And every time,
my skull gets in the way.