Every morning, I read newly published poems from online sources, in search of good poems to share with Facebook friends on their birthdays. Over the years, I have become increasingly selective, which leads me to quickly pass on poems about death and other dark issues inappropriate for birthdays. But I have also developed some idiosyncratic reasons to skip poems. I skip poems all in lower case, poems sprawling across the page, poems with sentence fragments or inconsistent punctuation, and even poems written in the imperative mood. In other contexts, I have nothing against such things (except for inconsistent or misused punctuation), but for birthdays, I prefer poems that don't have them. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 8 November 2026)