We choose what gives us meaning. I
chose you. That’s why
when people ask
me to unmask
and tell them if I’m ‘happy’, they
head off astray:
that’s not the glue.
But what I knew –
in the first minute, when we met
(part pledge, part threat) –
was that our text
defines, connects.
Of course, it’s only when you turn
the last page, learn
its backward view,
say farewell too,
that you can fully understand
an author’s plan.
So bugger books
and how we’ll look
to hooked, impatient readers who
will hurry through
to reach the end.
Leave that unpenned.
Tom Vaughan writes: “The poem I would choose to represent myself, Save the Last Page for Me, first published in Staple, represented a particular challenge. I’d come across the form (‘minute’ poems, i.e. 60 syllables in each stanza, with rhyming couplets and a pattern of four or two foot lines) which it was suggested was only for comic poetry. I wanted to say something serious, and hope I succeeded. Writing the poem was also another reminder that at least sometimes the more you work within the confines of a strict form, the more you discover what you wanted to say. The poem is about my wife, Anne.”
Tom Vaughan is not the real name of a poet whose previous publications include a novel and two poetry pamphlets (A Sampler, 2010, and Envoy, 2013, both published by HappenStance). His poems have been published in a range of poetry magazines. He currently lives and works in London.
Form in Formless Times 