Is it allowable to use the lojban period to the same purpose as an English comma (show pauses for the reader)?
Nope. The Lojban period is a kind of phonological/morphological entity.
It's there to help retain semantic unambiguity in a text string.
There's the "it's taking me a while to think up what to say" pause {
.y. } or { .yyyyyy. } But Lojban makes the grammatical structure so
clear to the reader that nothing like the European comma is really
needed.
mu'o mi'e komfo,amonan