You think about all the words you've ever written,
Reams upon reams, spiralling spell-like back
To when you first scrawled an 'I' upon a dotted line
In school - think staggeringly of it all, then visualise
Where these endless written words might have gone:
Pages lost, thrown away, forgotten, left to
Rest with all the lost works of Antiquity,
Though never destroyed (as nothing really is) -
For every character we carve, whether on stone,
Papyrus, paper or type, lingers in a reflex,
In a human constant, a further spiral into the future,
A carbon copy always in a cabinet of the mind
For when among friends you can pull out and show
In the form of a memory, a knowledge, a history.