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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