A hardback about mystics and
a guidebook to Hell share space
on the carpet beside my bed.
Poetry books are all around,
my favourite writers revisited,
new ones investigated, discarded
or ignored. Words don’t go away
and somehow I must make sense
of them: sculptural manifestos,
songs of love, despair, dubious
lyrics and reports from war zones
we’ve forgotten, blurred together.
Information waits to be excavated:
bookmarks in what I want to read,
have made a start on or piled up.
There is no map of Hell, it is just
a collection of stories about what
goes on there, in contrast to the
delights of being human, watching
dust and language drift and settle.
.
© Rupert M Loydell
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