Posted in Sympathy?

[readingthedark]

Tangled Web of Ideas


Years from now,

all the jottings and scribbles
that we crank out with tired fingers,

will be boxed-up, archived and put away,
rubber-banded, stapled and in manuscript boxes,

but that doesn't trouble me one bit,
not at all - even out of print,

I will have amassed my printed pages.

My sadness comes from the death the works endure
outside of my cabinets and trunks,

the small presses I lure into my lands
will bless them into existence finitely,

and paperbacks are stripped
and hardcovers are remaindered;

cheaper to hock or destroy than keep in warehouses,
and it's tragic, the malignancy of the industry
that lets stories live and die

as authors push parameters
and claw at the boundaries

for advances on margins,
selling books before they're done,
merely because we cannot eat the words we write.

Geoffrey H. Goodwin