Back on the shelf

She was a librarian, so
we did everything by the book.

We met in nineteen eighty four.
For a while she was my Brighton rock.

At first we were like other couples
enjoying our brave new world.

But I went to stay in her bleak house
next to the waste land by the aerodrome.

I suffered from lost illusions
in that Alice-in-wonderland world.

Don't tell me the truth about love:
It was love in the asylum.

We alternated war and peace which left me
in the heart of darkness, a dangling man.

In the trial she put me through
I could never connect my crime and punishment.

I sank to wuthering depths
as the all too visible man.

I'd have preferred the road not taken
and to sing again those songs of innocence.

But this is not the age of innocence,
or common sense, not this side of paradise.

I needed no persuasion
to return my outstanding loans,

to tear up my library card
and watch television instead.

I still wonder what I met her for.

 

Thanks to George Orwell, Graham Greene, John Updike, Aldous Huxley, Charles Dickens, T S Eliot, Rex Warner, Honoré de Balzac, Lewis Carroll, Dylan Thomas, W H Auden, Leo Tolstoy, Joseph Conrad, Saul Bellow, Franz Kafka, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Emily Bronte, H G Wells, Robert Frost, William Blake, Edith Wharton, Tom Paine, F Scott Fitzgerald, Jane Austen