It’s been advised to me by Heather that if I just took the time to re-draft each poem I wrote, I’d be much happier with the overall resulting piece and with myself in general. I will also float on a cloud of puppy dog’s kisses and the winks of an elf all the way over to the sherbet kingdom to take my rightful throne.
I don’t know where that last sentence came from – disregard that.
I’m a writer that works extemporaneously, so I don’t relish the idea of going through whatever I’ve written and picking through it. I do this very specifically because I feel that rehashing and disturbing what I’ve put out tampers with the product that I’ve created – for the same reason you can’t change how a fleck of paint hits a canvas by going back and painting over it. By working off the cuff and in a more stream of consciousness manner, I also think that I can capture a more resonating item for the reader.
In the interests of experimentation, however, I am willing to sully my pristine works with the vile canker of annotation. This is a piece that I haven’t published on the site yet, but will later – I’ll post the original here, then the edited version beneath:
“So a child will ask:
what is a weapon?
And he learns
that a weapon is a stone
or fist in any form
or a gun and its trigger
whether it hooks to a thorn.
A rose has more thorns than petals, he knows.
So a man will wonder:
what is the worst weapon of all?
And he observes
missiles, pens, planes, bacteria,
fire frenzy ash destruction,
the lens of a camera,
the bottom line,
the dotted line,
the barbed wire fence.
A bomb has more forms than flames, he knows.
So an old man will know:
man himself is the weapon.
He has grown to see his friends
live and die,
the vapour trail sizzle in the sky,
and observe -
man flies the jet,
man signs the plan,
man picks the target,
and the catastrophe left
is evidence.
So it was they laid blame on
God and Country,
but cast them off for peace and sanity.
A man has more excuses than sins,
he knows.”
“What age a child learns to ask,
‘What is a weapon?’
is too early to know,
but he learns so fast what forms it can take:
the fist so fast,
the stone so hard,
the stick so sharp,
the gun so deadly.
He learns those words so early, they have no meaning anymore.
When a boy becomes a man, he has used a weapon,
And he’s felt its weight in his hand and the look has been in his eye.
He asks ‘What weapon is worst?’
He dreams in his boxes about burning and boiling,
about cutting and killing,
about bombing and billing.
These words he tries to master,
Both in theory and in hand,
But the farther he goes,
The closer he gets to the truth.
The man grows to become old.
He has met his future and has nowhere left to go,
and he knows,
Man is the worst weapon.
Man always signs the papers that order trigger squeezes,
Man always pilots the planes and chambers the bullets,
and Man always knows how to shift the blame.”
It’s not up to me to say which is better. I’ll collect some opinions.
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