The Archives

When they told me I had cancer
I was overwhelmed by a sense of things needing to be done
or done again, done better
I went to the archives and pulled everything
The novel that never got beyond the first few pages
Short stories that stalled after a promising first paragraph
Numerous notes towards essays never written
Flawed scripts to unmade films
Partial lyrics to unrecorded songs
Going through it all turned my stomach
The incompleteness of everything sickened me
I wandered for hours through a maze of unfinished rooms
littered with dead-end concepts
strewn with the bones of bad ideas and good ones
A chaotic necropolis of experiments that failed
or were abandoned from lack of conviction
by earlier versions of myself, now also extinct
Finally the ghosts of my dreams
began to whisper of another write-off
How could I hope to put this half built charnel house in order?
Where would I even start?
I start with the poems, the early ones
A long body of work laid out in a cardboard coffin
tragic juvenilia
stiff with self-consciousness and pale with literary influence
I flush out the affectation, slice off the bad lines
Amazingly, instantly, the poems switch on
Their toes twitch
They come alive and move
the way they were intended to but never quite did
I wonder what's happened
Why I can do this now
It can't be emotion recollected in tranquillity
I haven't acquired that yet
Maybe I've just got the knack
at last
Perhaps it rode in on the back of my test results
for reasons too ironic to contemplate
When I had the time I didn't have the ability
Now I have the ability I may not have the time
But let's not be negative
They caught it early
It hasn't spread
This time for the first time
I may have both the ability and the time
If I can't fix the past
and I can't fix the present
at least I can fix the archives
While they're doctoring me
I'm doctoring the record
and just for the record
both procedures appear to be working