A life hastily written by amateurs (that's us, by the way) and out of ink just when the best part is happening. |
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The Pen Runs DryFumbling our way through life, it seems to meis much like a series of short stories that we insist into a novel, badly done and the editor was out to lunch that day Over-plotted, characters obscure and undefined It isn’t War and Peace and we’re not Tolstoy History will clean it up, the victors always do well after the fact of life, a critical review But history makes a lifetime work of censure and won’t submit a damn thing of its own Lived well or badly, scrawled equally across a page, every life leaves tracks that quickly fade They’ll scribble final Cliff Notes when we’re gone Even then a page at most for lives lived greatly, a mere paragraph, a sentence for the rest of us Eighty years or so, edited to fit, survivors listed, marriages to fill it out A life finally boiled down like a pot run dry But it breathed and bled through pain and fear, it smiled and loved, this life so badly penned The moments each and everlastingly connected like numbered dots that form an image and it could have, might have been a masterpiece If only we could see the colors in bold strokes Each of us wrote hurriedly, hands shaking, novices, as best we could, one draft without revision Too much paper, the dialog dashed off unrehearsed, apprenticed with no clear need to learn the craft Far too much to ask and yet it’s what we’re given and all too soon the pen runs dry, too soon |
This poem is included in Jim Freeman's poetry collection THE SMELL OF TWEED AND TOBACCO available here in print or as an e-Book in your favorite formats. |