Dead Letters - Dec 19 2025

 

Dead Letters

Dec 19 2025

I used to correspond by postal mail.

Which means my letters

if they were even kept

would have ended up with the recipients.

So I have no mausoleum

of dead letters

in a cardboard box somewhere.

And by now

The Dear Sirs

to the Editors

and to Whom It May Concerns,

the breezy postcards home,

witty notes to friends,

and hand-written love letters

have most likely been shredded, burned, or lost.

Which is an unpleasant thought

for a self-proclaimed writer

whose every word is precious

at least to him.

The illusion of permanence;

which persists even now

in electronic memory

and the digital cloud.

But with 3 laptops having melted down,

and my writing barely rescued

by clever nerds

at some expense 

just to be lost in the next;

and with the so-called cloud

dependent on the powers that be,

it seems that my archive of words

 — all the bad poetry

pretentious verbiage

and earnest sentiment —

is as perishable

as life itself.

So I will not be read in posterity.

Will not be celebrated

admired

or even recalled.

And have come to realize

that there is only the now.

Because If the past still exists

it’s only as we remember it

and memory is flawed;

while the future

is no more than a guess,

assuming, of course

it even comes to pass.

So read this, and forget.

Or read it again, if you wish,

then hit delete

send it to the trash

and let it moulder the rest.

Clay tablets survived millennia, parchment centuries, and paper decades — at least. (Which is another illusion: that of technological progress.)

But computer memory? Digital information may seem permanent, but really isn’t. Hard drives melt down, formats change (remember floppy discs?), phones get dropped in the toilet, the cloud goes off-line, server farms have their power-lines cut. And data can only be transferred so many times before it gets lost or corrupted. Nothing is permanent. 

Perhaps the iconic image in Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 comes closest to permanence:  human memory, in the form of an army of human repositories memorizing and reciting cherished works.

My Gmail and laptop contain an exhaustive archive of all the letters I’ve sent. My poems are duplicated on the same laptop, a thumb drive, and in the cloud (this blog). But I have no illusions any of it will survive me. Which is somewhat depressing. But also good for the ego: only bearable if one cultivates humility, doesn’t take oneself too seriously. 

This immediate inspiration for this poem came after consigning another letter to the editor that also likely won’t get published, and will almost certainly only be read by 1 person other than myself:  that infernal editorial page editor (who wouldn’t recognize a worthy letter if it hit him on the head!) If you’re interested, here it is. (In the unlikely event it does get published, I’ll be sure to come back and revise this!)

Re: Extortion suspects abusing asylum loophole … (OPINION — Dec 19)

Gary Mason’s op-ed on South Asian criminals abusing a slow backlogged asylum system brought to mind the genuine refugees who can’t even access that system because of more bureaucratic and political inertia:  the brave Russian anti-Putin anti-war dissidents and activists who thought they were safe in the US only to face — under Trump — forced return and certain incarceration or death. Canada could easily offer refuge instead. It’s as simple as a signature on a ministerial permit. In a just world, that would already have happened. Why hasn’t it?

Another source of  inspiration was the podcast, which I listened to earlier today and was clearly on my mind.

https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/heavyweight/id1150800298?i=1000741771607