Time
All you have to do is avoid death and poverty for twenty-odd years and you find yourself surrounded by piles of old useless Stuff. Since I do not want such piles to take over my life I spent some time today sorting through two drawers full of old modems (in three different sizes), parallel port printer, USB and telephone cables, a scanner, floppy disks, memory in small dimensions,
and paper. With writing on it.
Among this paper was some poetry left over from the late 80s. It's been sorted through before, so most of it isn't as bad as expected, but there is one sheet of yellowing A4 that is going straight to the recycling bin, even if it does have one good line in it:
"Around us soft betrayals raging"
Well, I liked it. Sobre gustos no hay nada escrito.
It's an example of the "slather it on thick and say it twenty times in as many different ways" school of poetry, which is only any good if each of those twenty ways is also saying something else. And the punch-line is:
"I still will be your friend."
So some time in March 1988 I felt strongly enough about someone to produce 20 lines of carefully-metered but unfortunately repetitive poetry, with a fairly challenging rhyming scheme, only one weak rhyme (knees and memories?), but nonetheless only one (possibly) good line, on the subject of the enduring nature of our friendship.
Shame I can't remember who it was for.