Wow: remind me not to have that dream, Max.
You update it well....
Doug
On 2012-06-19, at 11:36 PM, Max Richards wrote:
> makings of a Wootton poem? the great recorder…
>
> I have now looked out a Housman quatrain I could only misquote from memory:
>
> When the bells justle in the tower
> The hollow night amid,
> Then on my tongue the taste is sour
> Of all I ever did.
> and Yeats:
> “Things said or done long years ago,
> Or things I did not do or say
> But thought that I might say or do,
> Weigh me down, and not a day
> But something is recalled,
> My conscience or my vanity appalled.”
>
> and Eliot:
> And last, the rending pain of re-enactment
> Of all that you have done, and been; the shame
> Of things ill done and done to others' harm
> Which once you took for exercise of virtue.
>
>
>
> On 20/06/2012, at 10:08 AM, Bill Wootton wrote:
>
>> Nothing does delete these days, Max. Once it's out, it's out. We are all published. Daily. Minutely. The great
>> recorder is unforgiving. More unnerving yet again is the apparent ability of the Unforgiver to penetrate the
>> realms of sleep.
>>
>> On Wed, Jun 20th, 2012 at 7:32 AM, Max Richards <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>>
>>> Laptop
>>>
>>> What woke me was
>>> a dream gone wrong.
>>>
>>> I was at my laptop
>>> scrolling down a long set
>>>
>>> of images - my whole life,
>>> no less. What was great
>>>
>>> was the power I had - to
>>> delete whatever I wanted gone.
>>>
>>> There was so much to wish
>>> I'd never done or seen!
>>>
>>> Shames, large and small -
>>> woundings self-inflicted
>>>
>>> or on others - all
>>> half-buried, lurking,
>>>
>>> now in full sight, but
>>> mercifully still private.
>>>
>>> I pondered how best
>>> to work right through the lot -
>>>
>>> every image, year by year.
>>> First time I clicked, however -
>>>
>>> nothing would Delete.
>>> In pain and anger
>>>
>>> I woke, reaching for -
>>> no laptop but mere
>>>
>>> disordered bedclothes,
>>> a long burdening life.
>>>
>>>
>>> Max Richards
>>>
>>>
>>>
>
Douglas Barbour
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