Tinkering With The Past (Poetry)

The first page began in a mood of unusual abandon
brave, confrontational — thinking she’d nothing to lose
with a long list of woes in disorder, created at random
like some strange set of lyrics for privately singing the blues.

Missed opportunities — numerous roads she’d not taken
for whatever reason, fate swerved and her compass veered wide
of the map once imagined — planned routes so abruptly forsaken
when love’s grand illusion had finally fizzled and died.

One by one, she recalled every villain — those shadowy reavers
who’d herded pet dreams and led all of her young hopes astray.
Those quite plausible preachers who preyed on such naive believers
they fleeced her of romance, then went their philandering way.

The cast like some movie disaster — the plot self-repeating
with echoes — predictable scenes playing out to the last
with the hand-wringing heroine tragically pacing and bleating
blind to the future, determinedly deaf to the past.

Most faces forgotten — raw passion’s so fickle and fleeting
now-sketchy entanglements ironed out their purple in prose
but lacking in detail — drawn faint and the lines barely meeting
so greyed into time, her first impetus faltered and froze.

Page two a poor scribble — nostalgic — reads back as half-hearted
old dramas diluted, turned thin-tissue-papery wet
the seethe of resentment so fierce when her saga was started
has palled to a singular pang of unfocused regret...

She grieves for lost princes she conjured when classified ‘lonely’
the truth such bad fiction she’s forced to be vague with the ‘facts’
all else should be read with a pinch of the salty stuff only
this new version’s dead keen to admit what the duller draft lacks.

Altogether a gripping, more positive take on the story
the re-written manuscript grabs with a voice all its own
ironic how wit crafts deceit into literal glory
and digs out the marrow hid sly in a thickness of bone.