The Writer Aged by Martin Porter

His life flows like ink from his fountain pen,
The type that sucks up the blackness by capillary action
Effortlessly, until one day
A blockage might occur in the feed
Or the sac begins to perish
And decay.

He wears his hat at a more jaunty angle
But fails to conceal the less distinct nature
Of his hairline, the smudged boundary
Between lip and chin, the creased parafiltrum
And the lines on his face drawn
With time’s fine nib.

He knows he is in the wrong stanza
Of a poem he writes, but
It is his readers who create the character,
He has lost control, is not who he imagines himself to be
And nor are we, drifting along his script,
And he is aged.

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