Thomas Hardy Sends An Email

I need slide no confessions under doors where they are brushed by farm boots under mats. Bored girls buy no new-fangled cards. How that Valentine throbbed, foamed with silk hearts, false flowers! Forget notes, in a stiff, slow, childish hand, I flick the quick screens I must understand, electronic errors

when one click sends the secret you must keep to the whole office, and the office cat, when a lone drunk, locked in a basement flat, can stop a heart with threats of knives and rape, when the young man, whose smile dissolves your screen, asks for your password and your username. I could not make this up.

Listen. My dark keys tap. Let me confess my long books lied to you. For I was Fate. My messages? All false. Desire, too late re-programmed me. In anger, I hung Tess. Old wordings, slights, my grand house fall from me. I log out, choose. A fiddler I must be, whose tunes bemuse and bless.