Evicted (I) Poem by Percy Dovetonsils

I've got
one month
to get rid
of my books

I've got to
sit down
with Jorge Luis Borges
and Herman Melville
and Edgar Allan Poe
and William Faulkner
and Flannery O'Connor
and Frank O'Connor
and Evan Connell
and James Joyce
and Sam Beckett
and Balzac, Flaubert, du Maupassant,
Sartre, Camus, Simenon,
and Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Steinbeck,
andJames Salter
and Miguel Cervantes
and Nathaniel Hawthorne
and Nathaniel West
and Joe Heller
and E L Doctorow
and Gabriel Garcia Marquez
and Robert Bolano
and Pushkin, Tolstoy,
Dostoyevsky, Solzhenitsyn,
and the Brontes
and Michael Herr and Gustav Haasford
and Phil Klay and Anthony Swofford and Ben Fountain
and Sebastian Junger and Jon Krakauer
and Jhumpa Lahiri
and Maxine Hong Kingston and Amy Tan
and Viet Thanh Nguyen
and Walter Mosley
and James Ellroy
and Elmore Leonard
and Budd Schulberg
and Ray Bradbury
and Toni Morrison and Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin
and Lorraine Hansberry and Suzan-Lori Parks
and Henrik Ibsen
and George Bernard Shaw
and Bert Brecht
and Anton Chekhov
and Edward Albee
and Tennessee Williams
and Arthur Miller
and John Patrick Shanley
and Sam Shepard
and David Mamet
and Margaret Edson
and Paula Vogel
and Charles Bukowski
and Tadeusz Borowski
and Primo Levy
and Etgar Keret
and Dino Buzzati
and Jamaica Kincaid
and Aldous Huxley
and Virginia Woolf
and Tobias Wolfe
and Thomas Wolfe
and Tom Wolfe

and explain
that we're all evicted
and there's no room
in my new place
for them

or for May Swenson,
Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell,
W B Yeats, Sharon Olds,
Billy Collins, or even C P Cavafy.

"Will there be room, "
asks Charles Dickens,
"for ANY of us? "

"I'm thinking of taking
Twain's Roughing It
and keeping it on the night table
as a token, "
I say.

"And maybe a bilingual
edition of Dante's Inferno,
secreted away
in the flatware drawer.

"That's about
it.

"Oh, and Cameron Crow's Conversations
with Billy Wilder."
"If you're favoring Hollywood, "
says AdelaRogers St Johns,
"you better bring me and
What Price Hollywood? "
"Then what about me and
I Should Have Stayed Home? "
asks Horace McCoy.

You're right, Horace.
We all should've stayed home.
But we can't go home again.
There're not enough bookcases
and no room of our own
in this brave new world.