I’ve kept a journal of sorts for years
And I enter it in ink,
Not with a ball-point biro, it’s
Designed to make me think.
I form the letters with loving care
And I use an italic pen,
And keep it safe on a shelf up where
I can read it, over again.

The journal contains my deepest thoughts,
My secrets, hidden away,
Not to be seen by the eyes of men
Till I’m under the earth one day,
For all the wrongs that I didn’t right
And the rights that I failed to do,
Are hidden within its pages in
A sort of italic stew.

So when I received a letter from
A woman called Columbine,
Who said after reading my journal
She could never, ever be mine,
She mentioned a certain entry that
Had made up her mind, she said,
But the time and the stamp on the envelope
Was dated a year ahead.

I never had heard of a Columbine,
I didn’t know who she was,
But the fact that she’d read my journal
Made me more than a little cross.
I went to the shelf that held my book
To see what I had to thank,
But the page that she had quoted from
Was an empty page, a blank.

I went one day to the library
To look for a book of mine,
And the girl behind the counter there
Had a name tag, Columbine.
I looked deep into her stark black eyes
At the fall of her lustrous hair,
At her pouting lips and her fingertips,
And all I could do was stare.

She stamped my book and she stared at me
And she saw me staring back,
‘Is there anything else that I can do?’
She said, and called me Jack.
‘How do you know my name?’ I said,
‘Well that’s not super hard!’
And then she handed my book to me,
‘It’s on your library card!’

I asked her out for a meal, and then
The rest is history,
We were just engaged when I got to the page
That she’d written about to me.
I raised the pen, and decided then
That I had too much to thank,
Put the cap on my pen, and then
Left all the pages blank.

David Lewis Paget