Postage Due

We cannot blame the verse for collecting the fees;
for what we buy, we pay-  what we sent infront procures shadows.
We declare words used millions times over for a date, a line,
and claim, and ask other to acknowledge, the mastery, the command of the moment.

Why, then, should the lines fall into distrust?
Has not the gallantry of past and import of quickly scratched truth
more than atoned for the misuse of a solitary hand, code, year, or decade?

'Tis not the ink to be blamed for the turns of the pen,
no matter the chunk or overflow therein.
A quill cannot transfer words; it merely considers, alone, the brush of the breeze.

By all means, if the postcard be condemned, blame not the postman!
Should he answer for the tilts and lilts therein?
No, charge it to the debt of both the hand that twitched the curse to being
and that whom twitched it to hands who pledge delivery, if they be not the same.

But do not set upon the tasked, but the taskmaster-
retort not the sketch, but the sketcher,
and let the payment be due of he who garnered the bill.