Emptying cupboards from

the pre-Homeric Classroom era,

through strata thick as Schliemann’s Troy.

I am looking for bedrock and

the world before printing

when we worked with our bare minds

or a single piece of paper rolled

soaking wet from a banda machine.

When times were tough, we drank the fluid

and went outside to fight hairy colleagues from other lands.

Who can forget 1978 when that probationer

stole the Headmaster’s wife

and we sailed across the Firth in a fleet of long keeled ships,

the sun glinting on our oars?

Our beards have grown, our blood coarsened,

paper has closed over our bones like sand.

But there is a hot deep wind today at the skip.

It takes the sheets and spins them over rooftops,

all the dense tyrannies of words

gone to air at the end, like birds.