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Overloading the Machine

Tender

A farce, which was this hemophiliac doorbell
stopped in its tracks, that is their blessed glistening
meanness, like tumblers to a toddler

a ritual was something else
nothing, no circumlocution, no zeronones
a one pain above or a waiting design

its a range, it introduced the l to the l
and made its point, systematically
within a chart there is a folder

inside all this and unusual
an echo the ear can't wrap, won't
cling, not unavailable in not selling

not absent and not adorned
the three-legged stool, not unheard
but ill-advised, and often.

The Least Successful Collector Betsy Baker played a central role in the history of collecting. She was employed as a servant in the house of John Warburton (1682-1759) who had amassed a fine collection of 58 first edition plays, including most of the works of Shakespeare. One day Warburton returned home to find 55 of them charred beyond legibility. Betsy had either burned them or used them as pie bottoms. The remaining three folios are now in the British Museum. The only comparable literary figure was the maid who in 1835 burned the manuscript of the first volume of Thomas Carlyle's "The Hisory of the French Revolution", thinking it was wastepaper.

-- Stephen Pile, "The Book of Heroic Failures"