Paperbacks or gilded tomes,
Stephen King and Sherlock Holmes,
manuscripts and yellowed pages,
adventure stories for all ages,
Treasure Island, Ivanhoe,
the works of Edgar Allen Poe,
science fiction, horror, crime,
poetry and comic rhyme,
Holy Bible, lexicon,
Casanova and Don Juan,
The Basic Elements of Bowling,
collected tales of J K Rowling,
biographies and works of fiction,
the Coefficient of Friction,
Hamlet and A Winter’s Tale,
the works of Shakespeare dare not fail.
Today I’m subject to deflation,
thanks to digitalisation.
A bookshelf now we seldom see,
obscured by wall-to-wall TV,
and in its once instructive row,
the serried ranks of videos grow.