Postcards From the Edge

if seems familiar, read authors note

Adrift in the terminal light, a day setting

sail from the mother porch, I feel this urge

to write auf wiedersehen sayonara like life

is little more than an unexpected carcass

waiting to be skinned, pegged out, and left

to dry overnight … a postcard to time

and place you won’t be returning to.

 

Though I have heard this is how it is done

I have my doubts. How

you could conceive lines, jig thoughts

to a yearning, that does not require wrestling

the succubus to the draw of dawn

is a question too deep to fathom.

 

A surrender of self.

 

No time, season is ever free

of accounting. Every debt, each ache

however unintentional, needs

to be settled. Love or

Hate, in war or under flag of entente,

are merely symptoms of an intent,

a willingness to cleave the barnacles

from a soul’s keel in-flight

tailoring sorrows, rage of age

to forecast of intermittent tears.

 

My poet’s warning to

inevitability of I’s awakening to

an alternate interpretation --

that the ink we chose to spill

is regretfully indelible. Once

the pages have been blotted …

 

I see no other way to shade

than wading through the dying light

to day’s terminus.

Ken e Bujold 

Author's Note

Is a revision and new title of Spilled Ink. Left Spilled on site so anyone interested in how the process works can compare.
As an aside: just an uncle's nudge to young (old too) writers to remember a work is never done until it's really done. Revisions are what separate good from almost good

ken

Reviews

[W. Barrett Munn]

Thanks for leaving both up and cross-referencing. This new version works much better. I like dropping the line "thoug I have heard this is how it is done" further into body of the poem-it makes more sense to me at this point than the original. This, I think, is an interesting point, how, for me, anyway, how I am thinking about something is not how the words come out on paper, What is crystal to us when writing is confusing to a reader who is not privvy to our thought processes.
Overall, much prefer this latest version. Thanks for sharing it.

Winston