It’s only a week since I raised my head
From the depths of my favourite book,
The final tale in my library
And my basic foundations shook.
It had been so long since the world went wrong
And I fled from the things I heard,
To hide my head with the living dead,
And lose myself in The Word.

For the printed word is a friend of mine
Its sentiments never change,
It’s comforting when you read a rhyme
That no-one can rearrange.
No matter how many have read it once
The story will still suffice,
You know that the ending will be the same
When you come back to read it twice.

But the world outside, it seems had died
With its people all grown cold,
There was nothing left I could recognise
From the world that I’d left of old.
There wasn’t a smile on a single face
Or a humorous moment left,
There seemed a general loss of grace
With everything so correct.

The money hangs from the tallest tree,
Too high for us all to climb,
This world is new, belongs to the few
It certainly isn’t mine.
Another stabbing, another death
Is all that I read out here,
And populations take to the boats
As millions live in fear.

Small wonder then, I wander the streets
To look for a library,
In the search for a book I’ve never read
On the way that it used to be.
A former time when the world was mine
I’ll find it, by hook or crook,
For distant smiles and a woman’s wiles
I’ll bury my head in a book.

David Lewis Paget