Rewrite

Have you tried rewriting any of your old poems of late?

And found that the words were one size much too small

The mood too, now seems to sag at a different place

Nothing of it can be tweaked to fit this current state

The rhymes gone flat, nothing adds up to a complete whole.

Does the past add up in neat columns every time

The totals tight, reconciled, no blanks, no gaps?

Every memory doesn’t march in step, perfectly align

To this life now being written in imperfect rhyme

In dribs and drabs, where the past and future overlap.

An odd drape of the river on rocks, strangely clouded faces

Caught once between two firm words, now have escaped.

All of it now in my hands, empty roach egg cases

Parchment fragile, minutely ribbed emptinesses.

Cases of life from which all life’s been scraped.

Some mildly ugly smell, decayed flowers on the bank

Mixes in with the mud, yet still feels pleasant

Because these eyes had seen them bloom on the branch

They were shapes of petals before they drooped and stank

Their corpses strewn on the waves, carried into the present.

Why rewrite, I can hear you say, write things afresh

Why busy yourself with smells of pasts, why retrofit

Poems into discarded cases and emptinesses

Only... as things are written their scooped out flesh

Their pips and pulp fall into the past minute by minute.

The end is reached but the start is outdated

The shapes of cases, drapes of rivers, landscapes of time

Before the present can be plucked clear, segregated

It’s tugged both ways, each word is lost before it’s mated

Before it can hold its sense and find a rhyme.