Editing Our Sons

We want to write your life
It's not enough
to kickstart the genetics
We need to write on that blank page
our lives, edited to suit

Don't let us do it
Write your lines, your words
There's too much faded prose
showing through our pages
It never suits the author

Jealousy, some regret, not much
We see your paper blank, it's not
Hoping for a re-write, good reviews
of all those words we spelled wrong
Failed paragraphs, lots of chapters

Leave them there, scribbling your own
Takes lots of words to write a life
Punctuating yours as well or badly
as ours, nothing there to learn
But leave your son's pages blank

The self we couldn't sculpt
we'd carve in you
Take away the knife
Remembering where it's put away
to hide it from your son and his

And break the pen