Publish and Be Damned

Publish a book, they say, they say Only an hour or so out of your day The six months to write it they overlook Then ignore the time that the editing took They don’t count the time at my laptop I lurk To make that damned PDF converter work Or tot up the minutes or days that I frown While stopping the text coming out upside down They did note the day I found publishing heaven Until I discovered a third chapter seven Just for a moment I felt quite elated But now I’m concerned that my text is outdated How happy I was when I left-clicked on ‘Publish’ And waited a week for my self published rubbish My poem called ‘Panda’ I thought was alright Except I had written that they’re BACK and white So after more editing and double checking In hope that my format I won’t end up wrecking I slip in a poem to fill a blank page And then I republish… and wait for an age Unlike the first issue, I’ve ordered a proof Which might just turn up when I’m long in the tooth And then it arrives and it looks really fine But it’s got eighty pages, not seventy nine So publish a book, they say, they say Only an hour or so out of your day Well maybe one day there’ll be folk who have read it But first I embark on one more ‘final’ edit *** My full colour tome is a poetic eyeful Of poems for children, young ladies or chaps It’s called ‘There’s A Tiger In My Trifle’, And it’s out sometime soon…. Perhaps, perhaps [At the time of writing this, I was waiting for that ‘Final’ edit to go live. This should be by Friday 24 June 2022. Current version (edit 2) has one spelling mistake and one less poem. Will blog when out]