Pen Room

Notice the faint ink.
My pen is running out on me.
When I was wee, I would not dream
of throwing out a pen.
Mum would bring the box and virgin card
and I would dutifully scratch each nib.
But instead of discarding
the infirm – the frayed felt tips or ballpoints
so dried-up they could cough-up only quiet ink
and trail a parched riverbed across the paper –
I would stow them back, snug, arrayed
chromatically, carefully displaying
the ransacked card as indelible evidence,
but hiding the bin.

Her way was no way to treat those who’ve carried out
your whims, nestling them in slender casing, slimming them from infinite dimensions
to a dense 2,
and depositing them,
a tour de force on every page.
Pens who filled in Dad, even as the door slammed
and kept him filled out and loud
long after Mum’s yodeling diminuendoed
and the soft silence descended.
Pens you could grip, who never
flinched in your soiled plump fist, who always
had a scrawled tornado up their sleeve
when friends didn’t knock.
Pens can graffiti pristine walls, clothes, and skin –

If you press hard enough some pigment goes in,
mingling us as brothers in blood, ink, and arms.
So when they’re done I retire them to the box room
where they coalesce to a tattoo.
I would be upset if,
when I am old and have taken
to copperplate and a blanket
over the knees and my scribbled veins
clamour through parchment skin,
shiny bold pens shunned
my thoughts,
dulled and worn thin,
and wrote other things instead,
or put me away.


06/03