Half Written Poems. Poem by Tony Mushrow

Half Written Poems.


They lie about, half finished, like flapping fish, taken from the sea, gasping for oxygen. Half alive, half dead, I visit them at times, and tantalise them, with a word or a line. Then leave again, its cruel really, they didn’t ask, to be born. They hide in old books, phones, computers, scraps of paper.

They cry out to be finished, to be free from poem purgatory. Trapped between two worlds, the living, and the dead. How cruel I am to leave them, starving, hungry for letters, words, and lines. These abandoned ugly works viewed harshly as inferior or unsuitable, unwanted, so left unfinished.

So I give them distance, in a hope that when I revisit them I will have something, like a mother bird returning to her chicks with a worm, to cram into their yawning mouths.

I think I have a worm……………….…