I explore the manuscripts
of Emily Dickinson
and think about dashes.

What do they mean?
How important are they?

What about the line breaks?
The smudges on the page?

Where does the poetry end
and negative space begin?

I grew up, in part,
on e.e. cummings,
with his choices
of capitalization and punctuation.

I pause to think about the line break
the blank line
and I think about the syntax
of a mathematician
or computer programmer.

If you miss the semi-colon
the reader may be confused,
but figure it out.

The compiler,
on the other hand
throws an error
but pays no attention
to the spaces or line breaks.
(Depending, of course,
on the language used)