Remaindered
No longer upright like new soldiers
Nor neatly shelved, spines
straight-stacked
Alphabetical order, fiction authors A
to Z
But tumbled, piled at random
Stickered, scattered
Reduced, remaindered
Bargain bin, basement bucket
Rough treatment at many hands
Edges knocked, jackets torn
Dirty, dusty, fingered and forgotten
Marked up and marked down
With little dignity or ceremony
At the end of useful life
More space is needed
To make way for the new stuff
The spirit of today
What’s happening now
Celebrity authors and TV tie-ins
Titles that sell, units that shift
The next thing, the new wave
Modern, fashionable, exciting
Where it’s at, de nos jours
Moving with the times
The zing of the zeitgeist
And the ring of the till
No room for the out-of-print
Except out of the way
Out of sight, out of mind
Deleted from the catalogue
The stock-code and the index
A slow and lingering demise
And a delayed disposal
Awaiting the final solution
Dumped, shredded, pulped
The bulk commodity of paper
A never-borrowed, never-bought
Unread volume
No reviews nor royalties nor renown -
He handles a copy, thumbing its pages,
Familiar with every word
And the effort it cost him to write
Now regretful, bitter and broken
He flees from the bookshop
The door left flapping
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