I hear Heathcliff a’wuthering; he’s wuthering on the heights,
and when he gets all angry, he gives me such a fright…
I’m stuck in a 19^th Century Novel, and time keeps dragging on;
my only consolation: at least it’s not Uncle Tom.

When I was just a baby, my mother told me, Son:
always be a good boy, and not Dickensian,
But I’m stuck inside this workhouse,  I know I can’t be free;
eventually I’ll die of consumption,  what you might call TB.

There’s austentatious Gentry in their fancy country homes,
engaged in bright conversation, eating clotted creme with scones,
I’m stuck here in this Novel, like Marner at his loom,
Comedies of manner, voiced in proper decorum.

If I was free from this Novel, if the story it was mine,
I’d choose one with a plot-line, not quite as serpentine…
Far from 19^th Century Literature, that’s where I’d like to stay,
and I’d let the 21^st Century

….lose me in the buzz of fractured time and multiple perspectives.