There will be time

This is an inspiring website: contrariwise - literary tattoos. I love it. I have spent a lot of time on this site. I keep looking up the poems people slice quotes from onto their bodies. I don't have tattoos, but I do find them fascinating. Even tramp stamps. Even the phrase 'tramp stamps' . Everything about them is odd. Have a look at this essay on 'the human canvas', by Margot Mifflin, and this great quote:

“It’s personal socialism, lad...Everyone’s included, everyone gets to look in to a person and share them, like what they see or not…. Oh aye, and I’ll tell you this, lad: a tattoo says more of a fellow looking at it than it can do of the man who’s got it on his back.”

—Sarah Hall, The Electric Michelangelo

Come September, and time to read more, I will be very happy. I've just read a review of an intriguing sounding book I have to read, 'The Blue Tattoo: The Life of Olive Oatman' by Margot Mifflin:

The biography of a 19th-century Mormon pioneer who became a celebrity after she was captured as a 13 year old, raised, and tattooed on the face by Southwest Indians, then ransomed back five years later.


For today though, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock is just what I need though, and I'm grateful to contrariwise for making me think of it, read it. Deadlines are near and I am worried I don't have time.

And indeed there will be time
For the yellow smoke that slides along the street,
Rubbing its back upon the window-panes;
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.