Paper Man- A Poem

I once had this friend

A paper man

Cut from a discarded page

That had fallen from the well-worn spine that had split

On the book that formed the life that I'd lived

And captured every moment, before and so long after

That he’d been formed with jagged cuts to save

Only the words that matter most

The ones that still had some faded meaning

Left in safety to watch the past fall

Far away from the page that had been him.

They were once the moments and memories

Of a story that I swear used to be

Something to bring peace to a war-torn night

Where there was something steady and standing between

The raging waters of a spiraling river

Tumbling down toward an ignorant town

That swore so much they were a city, an evolution

Something more than a blank space seeking written renown.

And this paper man cut

From a forgotten book left

Deep in a childhood now gone

He stood at the head of a towering wave

And waited as he left more of himself behind.

Fewer of the words that had once granted solace

Fewer friends who had faded away

The paper man and the scissors cut slivers that scattered

Like a party’s confetti soon to be struck

By the wind and the willows and rain.

And the paper man meant many things to the river

He meant even more to what cut him away

Far from the tome of unfathomable weight

Far more like a poet’s empty page

He was losing the friends he’d lost so long ago

To the strangely impassive passage of time

He was letting go of the family that remained in his wake

Standing tall still in the strange waves of change

He was cutting so small the love and the life that was no

Longer anything more than a wish

For the what might’ve been, could’ve been, should’ve been still

And yet had left him with nothing but this.

This…

This small fragment of a greater story that had simply already been told

Told so very many times

That even those who loved it had grown old

And passed into ash that blew changes

And turned them into new life and better things

Like a strange strand of evolution so perfectly grasped

To leave behind the scissors that cut timelines

Instead of forming something much more like wings

Something, anything, to carry away the last remnants

Of the paper figure that stood before waves

That were little more than a metaphor for a coward’s feared change

But oddly that knowledge did nothing to erase

The crippling last gasp of anxiety and fear

The death grip of all that had been

And held so tight to what little the paper man had left

More that he wished might stay

That the scissors cut more and more even now still

And even then more fell away.

Words dropped like snow in the summer

They got caught in each wandering breeze

They got lost in the skies and the clouds and the lies

That perhaps they could fall somewhere new.

Somewhere they could’ve reassembled

Where old things and words and love long-deserved

Could fall into place as the could’ve been that would be

But the paper pieces of a paper man were simply words

And words will only get lost on the wind.

So as the waters moved with undisguised purpose

New blue that swept away the stagnant still life

It struck the once-towering paper sculpture

That had once been a towering man

A tale that had been written over decades

And to the tune of the songs that were his

Only to see the scissors cut like an editor

Who knew so well how little anything left truly mattered.

And the single page of a book that had split

And become even less than it was

Found that the life that was coming didn't care

Where it was going

Or who he’d been even now not so long ago,

Because change doesn’t stutter, it doesn’t hesitate or utter,

The last word that is ever left behind

As the scissors cut away the last bits of life that remained

The paper man found he had only one left

And he felt so small

So insignificant

So far away from what he had been

That he read it only once before being swept away

To either drown in the fresh new currents

Or be taken out to sea

And even though the latter sounds daunting and wrong

Doomed to the death of a hack writer’s siren song

It beckoned at least of some possibility

That even though in the end he hadn’t mattered

And even though his epic had already left him behind

Perhaps he could rebuild the story

Perhaps, if given enough time

Now safe from the towering scissors

That left ‘was’ as his last final line.