I don’t want Auden chopped up
And sprinkled in my Twitter stream.
Or van Gogh’s letters reimagined by
A ginger beard mugging for YouTube.
Keep Khayyam on the pages of the World War I chapbooks,
Complete with my grandmother’s soft pencil annotations.
What presence!
And Yeats?
If you get that fucking gadget anywhere near him …
I’ll get Vermeer after you.
He’ll chase you through the market
And alongside the canals until
You fall into the water with all the other bloated rats.
Back home, in the quiet of my study,
I’ll read everyone’s frozen words by candlelight.
The book is dead. Long live the book.
* I heard this last line uttered once by designer Irma Bloom. Of course, it riffs on the line, “The King is dead. Long live the King.”
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