Only Poets

 I think only poets can spend five minutes discussion whether to keep or remove a given word in a poem, whether to use a comma, a dash, a semicolon or a colon in a line. I love this minutiae, I must confess. It matters. Where and how one breathes in a line changes everything, and punctuation and syntax dictate those breaths. It's music. It's a ride on a boat and you must control how you go, when you let the current take you, when you pull aside to tie up for a moment. This is a clunky metaphor, but you get what I mean.