"The Pen Is Mightier Than the Sword"

Holding a pen is holding a weapon.

            I can slash through sentences without mercy. I can silence whole paragraphs in seconds. I can defeat an army of punctuation marks with a swift movement of my hand, forces of commas and periods and question marks transforming into exclamation points before they’re obliterated, flattened into inky scribbles on a white page.

            I can chew on verbs and devour my nouns. I can squash a period until it’s a comma and I can stretch a colon into an exclamation point. I can mold question marks into apostrophes.

            A pen is a hand.

            It can strangle a paragraph until it’s choking up sentences. It can rip letters from a word and then throw them across a page. It can tear two quotation marks apart and flip one into a comma and convert the other into an apostrophe.

            I can build a home for thousands of verbs and can set free a million adjectives. It can release hundreds of adverbs into the wild and it can pull them back when it needs just the right word. It can make a kingdom of similes and a country of metaphors. It can record the course of history and it can write and rewrite the future. It can free a million thoughts and catch a hundred possibilities.

            Holding a pen is holding the world in your fingertips.

Author's Note: "The pen is mightier than the sword." William Shakespeare. This is my favorite prose-y type thing I've written. (7.1.13)
~N