"But first, baby, as you climb and count the stairs (and they total the same), did you, sometime or somewhere, have a different idea?
Is this, baby, what you were born to feel, and do, and be?"

-Kenneth Fearing



Monday, September 26, 2011

A Later Draft

*


Every crumpled page says the same thing;

Once there was a man who needed nothing.

so let me start again.

having broken my bones against the wall,

which was again unmoved; having pulled

a thousand mornings in through a cigarette

I concede, to the blank page in a still typewriter.

that I must abandon revision, for a new draft,

to find the words which I’ve worked to polish dead.

Tell the real beginning now or the false one forever.

Tell what you’ve hidden, what your shadow says;

Once there was a boy who needed one thing.


                            
                                   -Brent Allard

4 comments:

  1. I absolutely love the line on the 'thousand mornings through a cigarette'.

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  2. Love it Brent,Tell the real beginning now, or the false one forever, How perfect.

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  3. clean and pristine depths. thank you.

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  4. Like breathing finally. Nice. (And thanks to Yvonne de la Vega for disovering this "for me".)

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