There’s a pretty bookshop
In the mall where I stop
of an evening to bask in the glow.
of keats and Jerome,
before toddling home
i might linger an hour or so
It’s a pleasantish place
and they fill up the space
in the front with a smallish cafe
and sometimes, i confess,
if the hours do not press
i might hang about most of a day
I’m not on intimate terms,
with my fellow bookworms
and wont let myself tax them unduly
still perhaps its unkind,
but when they bring to mind
certain authors, i christin them newly
On a day I won’t state
I’d stopped in for a plate
of biscuits and perhaps a small chai
when the svelte sillhouette
of a winsome Collette,
with a volume of Proust caught my eye
She’d been snagged by a stripling
not unlike a young kipling
who held her attention , and arm
I began to suspect
that the virtues of Hecht
werent the ones he pursued with his charm
then I chanced to glance round,
drawn perhaps by the sound,
of a Seneca, muttering in Greek
and I beheld not a few
folk arrayed two and two,
intermixed in amongst the more meek
A saturnine Poe,
with a pert Woolf in tow,
was pretending to parse Kierkigaard,
While a stately Ayn Rand,
With Anne Rice, hand in hand
was affecting amused disregard
an assertivre Camus
had assembled a crew,
of pale Kafkas, and one hapless Twain
In a booth by the door
where he regaled the floor
with contradictions implicit in Paine
till a black-clad Millay,
did a studied sashay
through his prospect,
and made the lad stammer,
and throw up his tirade,
as though she had laid
him across the forehead with a hammer
I had seen quite enough
of this singles-night stuff,
so I made deft repair to the stacks
where the used classics rest
side by side with the best
of the second hand trade paperbacks.
By a Disneyfied “Alice”
I picked out a “Valis”
and “Melmoth Reconciled” bound in calf.
to go home and unwind
with this fortunate find
was my thought, when I heard a quiet laugh
i beheld two thin chaps,
quite in each other’s laps,
with expressions that brought to mind Wilde
clandestinely thumbing
a volume of cummings,
best works, with the joy of a child
I detoured through suspense
so to raise up a fence
of fiction betwixt me and them
When I got quite a shock
passing Iris Murdoch
and I felt myself out on a limb
There was Sandburg himself,
hair mussed up like an elf
out of Tolkien, chatting up Jane
Austen, she preened and laughed
while they spoke of Lovecraft,
but escape was what I wished to gain
the poetry section,
i thought, on reflection,
I’ll certainly find respite there!
No! A Pince-nezzed Stout,
had his Longfellow out,
and was bending Le Guin crost a chair!
And a youthful Stendahl
had an Atwood asprawl
with her Brontes spread open before.
I spun round, so to flee,
but then what should I see,
but a shy little Oates by the door!
My tongue grew quite thick,
as she reached for my Dick,
and soon cradled my Balzac as well.
“Why such treasures your finding!
I’ve always thought binding
with leather was awfully swell!”
The whole thing turned out good,
when I quite understood,
and we afterwards went out a pair.
And we went to my den,
where we essayed Anais Nin
on the sofa bed next to the stair.
Now I’m straight home of nights
and I eschew the the lights
of the quiant little shop, without sigh.
for she’s bought me a Nook,
and declared that a book
store’s not for married men, such as I.
