Suddenly in this dream I was printer’s ink
Poured through the presses, patterned in every man’s
mind,
Ideas lodged in his fartherest recesses were mine,
Had taken in my angular black, the engrams
Of my pain under the presses.
Now I revenge, for when one dies
I let him see it all clearly, all that he’s learned
Now in its entirety for the first time known,
Laid in front of his soul’s eye painfully learned ...
Then lightly, laughingly, carelessly I withdraw my spirit.
Letters, sentences, paragraphs shudder and mingle, a little
black smear
Replaces each most delicate printed utterance,
A little ragged black snigger like a smudge
That bites like a scorched hole, spreading,
And each book blackens with thick noise
Full of the cries of the words lost in it.
And the libraries! They haemorrhage from their stacks.
So you would do well never again to read books
Nor to build up your children’s brains on foundations of
books
For it is a bookless pain and it lacks pictures
And it is an ocean of night-pain and noise.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Redgrove
