The Comma              

I’d like to take a bomber

And obliterate the comma,

Whose phrase attenuation

Is the bane of punctuation.

I always use too many;

In my prose they’re ten a penny;

While lawyers, rather direly,

Have abolished them entirely.

A comma alters, meaning

Is the goal to which I’m leaning.

The comma’s like a word or tense –

Change it and you change the sense.

Omit it and you must work out

What the prose is all about.

But I am truly disconcerted

When the comma is inverted.

Use the single or the double?

Bound to get you into trouble.

To place quote marks within quotations

Can cause a war between two nations.

It’s all a little much for me.

And so I’ll let the reader pout

And grimace, and just sort it out.