I first saw you as a blank page as if you only came
into existence when I started the story. A flat five acres
of unmingled snow with no footprints or dog mess.

You were blessed (we agreed you were) to be page one
without so much as a preface.

Summer turned into words dropping onto paper like
tiny pieces of clinker, pulsing into perfect sentences, glowing
with high-society adjectives and Parisian verbs forming
unparalleled paragraphs, never before recorded
in that order. Of course

the pages settled in sand by rocks in literary harmony,
stacking together, gathered, numbered, tethered,
rounded and bound to be a best-seller.

Our sculpted cover was my banner. Shiny and hard,
bronzed brazen, as beautiful as my criteria insisted upon, throbbing
with the intoxicating smell of freshly printed, unsullied uniqueness.

Rewind, realign, find idioms and clichés scrunched up
in seething paper dirt- balls, fleeing from the battered, brown suitcase
under your bed. Pale, parchment shadows. De-worded,
plotted and pawed, rhymed and grimed, read or book-marked
for later consumption.
Every one of them sentenced into the wall.
Pressed, impressed with your footprint.
A seasonal loafer, coated in dog mess.