< my holiday wish for writers >

[Achebe]

I've had those dreadful holidays,
they're overrated.  When last miserable,
I was London-summer miserable: befriending dead men
in their dying books; fitfully calling home, then
disconnecting, home being unrelatable
to my yellow smoke world, its dare-I-disturb ways.
I bore the dead parrot poesy for days
nailed to its perch, in the hope it might be able
to push up the daisies in my cliché ridden
Sitcom-sodden, Ellliot /  Auden brain.
But though I sat for hours at my table
I wrote nothing to impress the ellas and rays.