Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

They built it in a matter of’ weeks,
& the original design was altered by
omitting some of the foundations,
adding lean-to’s,
carp pools & towers
where it suited them.

The original concept was that
the books would be classified by
colour and size. 48 departments
were set up, to cater for
everything from tiny yellow books
to big green books.
Each room was painted the colour
of the books it contained.

Then things started to go wrong.

First of all, there were far too many
small blue books & big brown books.
Secondly, a single large puce book
had a curator and a room
all of its own, painted puce.

The whole orange medium-sized book department
had to be sacked when it was discovered
that they had a copy of Dewey’s classification
surreptitiously bound in orange.

A red & green striped Spanish-English dictionary
was the subject of a protracted dispute
between two departments, resulting in
two more sackings & an attempted suicide..

The 30 Dobermans & a company of
British Library crossbowmen (hired to
keep people out) went on strike.

The great Flexostructuralist Dictionary
(700 volumes in all) had to be built a
special two-floor section, which in itself
negated the definition of housing
contained in the Dictionary itself.

‘BUNGALOW: Four walls with a roof on top’ (vol.230, p.74)
‘HOUSE: ‘No bungalows with one on top of the
other but with only one roof’ (vol.398, p.284)

Then they appointed a new Senior Administrator.
This made things really unbearable; two
weeks after his appointment the staff found
out that he was colour-blind.

So they had a big meeting
& then went somewhere else.