Regret

Constant inconstancy

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It isn’t the same, it
                        can never stay the same.

No grass seeds always ready to
raise their blades again, only
                        
                        change

slow or sudden,
willed or unbidden,
                        there is only change

& nothing else.

Habit & time,
                        being & repetition
build an image of difference
                        & permanence,

but there is only change;

the one constant
                        dressed as paradox:

there is only change,
                        change

& nothing else.

Lost Futures

/ wordsforghosts / 2 Comments

For S

Today gave me a vision
of what could have been; I saw
between all the mistakes
I’ve made,
there in your home where
you & your children live:

an echo of
hauntology;
the lost future that could have been
if only

life had treated us differently,
if only

we’d received

what we really wanted.

Pause, & add your own intentions…

/ wordsforghosts / Leave a comment

You found me at the worst possible time,
but only in the sense in which a dog-walker finds
a corpse in the woods:

        It wasn’t your fault.

The words in this verse are replacing
the excuses I’d prepared for presentation:
words about falling, & nihilism &
other self-pitying bullshit trying
        to play tragic…
but the truth
        is never quite so ornate
as I’d like to make it…

I told you that I’d become a mistake.

But that doesn’t make it ok…

I remember you as
vulnerable insolence &
timorous intelligence but
I was too selfish to realise how
much attention you gave to my words &
how little you understood about my
actions:

        your skin
compelled me to write a poem across
the inside of your left thigh
            & I think
you found it charming.

That poem had been written for someone else…

Attention is the rarest & purest
form of generosity*: you
    gave it to me
        & I what did I
give back to you?

Nothing:

it wasn't that I didn't care
it was just that I hated everything…

So this
is an attempt to apologise
        for the ugliness
by replacing it
        with failed attempt at elegance.

& that still doesn’t make it ok…

* Simone Weil