Periodically Yours for the Making, Full Stop
It's not just punctuation - it's the portal to possibility
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What’s the point?
The period.
The full stop go.
It’s the all sorts, sorted, blocked, and ready. Time to get your composing stick out—you’ve got work to do.
Some call it a full stop. Some, a period. It is a colonial bugbear. A how dare. Both are right. Correct. True. Full stop or period or full point or mark—it is the end of the affair, the thought, the positioning of the opinion. The exposition and the transition. The end. No more. Done.
No. Period. Nuh-uh. Full stop. Mind your p’s and q’s. Mind your b’s and d’s, too. But lay out your letters in your wordy street, mind your step, and leap willingly into the open manhole of the period at the end of the lane.
It is a portal to the next world.
A tunnel to the underside, the underworld, the other side of the wilder ride.
The next life of your story (paragraph, chapter, verse, or tome.)
The next.
A period is a closed door, waiting to exhale its opening to the unknown. A dot with promise. A possibility yet to be unlocked, unhinged, unbarred. None shall pass! All may enter.
It is not exclamatory, nor interrogative—there are other marks more suited for that. It is clutching the clasped handbag of the declarative, the definitive, the pathway to conclusion. Open and shut. The stop therefore I go, and on, and on, and on. Shut the door, pause with hand on the brass of the enter, then twist to open and continue the journey. To where? Who knows. The point? All signs point to there.
It is the full stop. It is the full go. All periods lede to exposition, even the buried ones. But only if you stop on the dot. Only if you step into (onto?) the rounded void of this endless tunnel. The light, a prick in the distance. Rest on the baseline, with your foot on the pitch-nothing-black of the endpoint. The spot, the speck, the jot. Yearn to kern if you must, but step with steady relish into the void of periodic possibility. Periodically. Period.
See the light. The pinpoint. Hear the whistle blow.
To assemble the blocks in the correct order and declare at the end that this is the end, but also the beginning. The message reads because the message reads, and always, and always, and always again the point, the period, the final sucker punch to the paragraph. It is the typesetter’s bony finger jab to the chest bone, leaving the ink of impression.
This is done. The full point. The whole point and nothing but the point.
The point is: There is nothing more optimistic than a period.
Nothing.
Period.
The half-empty glass only sees it as the end of something. The half full, the promise of what’s to come. You won’t know until you start typing. Until you put the point of the pencil to the paper and flow with the throb of a meandering cursive river. Carving. Slicing. Eroding at the landscape of your story with its signature.
The start, the middle, the full stop go.
You press the end of your pen on a surface to make the mark. A single dot. Ink bleeds. A full stop. This is how you end a sentence, periodus. Hope springs from finality. Only when something ends can something new begin. The next sentence. The next paragraph. The next phase in the flow of life. It is a knife, a slap, a closed door to the thought.
The period, says the internal typesetter, is the point. A black hole in this verbose universe pulling all toward the event horizon. Put your eye here—rest for a moment on this, our journey through space. Allow your eye to take a breath, a lung full of imagination in your third eye inhale of this cosmos. Your eye is a dream, a hope, a pleasure cruise on a milky way of stars. The period, a ship to steer the float, tethered to the grammar of our punctuated planet.
All points north, that’s the point. A continuation on. Three dots suggest a path to the delicious unknown. More to come. No more power than the tip of that pen. The tap of that key. The dot of that page. The period. The full stop. It is a hole shot, clean through the bullseye of your intention.
The point. Get to it. Always chase and keep the fingers moving on keys, or with your ink, or in your sky. Lead your creative horse to the full stop, the period, the watery oasis of exposition. Hydrate and move on.
There is no question mark to it. What’s the point? WHAT is the point. What you make of it. What that dot can do. The point on which you plant your flag and sink your putt and shine your light into the night sky at the shy moon.
The point is to keep it brief. And if not keeping it brief, to run on with pauses and steps, and kicks of heels before sliding to a complete stop at the end of understanding.
The point, the period, the full stop, is a knife to the belly of ramble. A fatal stop in the tracks. But the story continues—if you want it to. Take your full measure and spread out your tale using all the marks, all the punctuation, all the swash and buckle and bleed.
Final is a fallacy. Full stop. Period.
Ask any editor.
Until you go to press. Until you reach roll-end.
Point blank—what’s the point? Have we reached the breaking, the tipping, the boiling? It’s easy to see the end of the line as being just that—the End of the Line. This was the goal, you have reached it, put down your tools, your implements, your bindle. But the work doesn’t stop when the dot does. The period is a period of breath. Of rest. Of preparing to launch to the next.
The next end of sentence—the end of time.
Block by block, line by line, manhole to manhole—we must join the dots and make a world.
Now, you’ve got a point.
Use it.
.
Yours in tiny thought,
Janeen
Get the background on this post 👇
This week’s amends…
I am almost finished
I am almost finished so I can start again. Please pretend this is a love poem against pandemics. What would we write were the future erased? I have imported a file named a compulsive fondness for impossibility. The way I make my mouth in a shape to kiss you and then do not kiss—this is evidence my information is precise. Networks have every one of them exploded. All day it was searching for a story built of pigs like a woman in a golden dress posing for a digital photograph among her lessers. I am being taken.― Anne Boyer (2009), The Two Thousands
Via the Pome newsletter
Yes, mentions pandemic. Well pre- this -pandemic. I did some digging. Anne Boyer put this out as part of Free Poetry, Vol. 5, No. 1, September 2009. From the back of the downloadable PDF (I’ve included it below) of The Two Thousands:
Free poetry publishes essays and poetry by today's leading poets. These chat books are available free of charge and without copyright. The editor encourages the reproduction of this chapbook and its free distribution, ad infinitum.
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