I pass my time with the living dead
As I sit in my home, alone,
As spectres range through my fevered head,
I don’t have a telephone,
I tend to avoid the world out there
And the folk who pass in the street,
So only go out in the night to roam
And hope that we’ll never meet.

The world, to me, is an empty place
By the light of the gas-lamp glow,
I only roam historical streets
Of a hundred years or so,
My people walked in the streets and lanes
Where I drink my fill of the past,
The lives they lived, though over and done
Are the only ones that last.

I bury my head in ancient books
That tell of their living deeds,
The interactions and social factions
That answered most of their needs,
They come alive on the page to me
As I share their highs and lows,
Like Oscar Wilde with his sense of style
And the Edgar Allan Poes.

So many lives that were lived, then lost
That wouldn’t have left a trace,
If someone hadn’t written of them,
Had tried to capture each face,
Their words are part of our culture now
As some writer set them down,
And these, the writers are dead themselves
But their books are their renown.

A life is only ever complete
With the last and final breath,
We cease to be the man in the street
The end of the book is death.
But life is there on the printed page
To entrance with what they said,
And I’m content to enrich my life,
To walk with the living dead.

David Lewis Paget