Marginalia

I met a literary woman.
She was beautiful.
So I did what any man would do --
I punctuated her.
I played with her nouns,
stroked her verb,
licked her apostrophe,
tickled her commas.
She started to moan.

Afterward, she complained I changed
her comma to a semicolon.
She called me a brute.

I got up, zipped up my dangling participle,
put on my question mark,
got into my two-door convertible
exclamation point
and drove home.

Ernest Slyman

If you've any comment on this poem, Ernest Slyman would be pleased to hear from you.