Truth be told

Memoirs and Confessions of an Unrepentant PhD Student

I have been leading a double life

Evidenced in my two library affiliations.

The respectable university card grants me access to the tomes of my trade or morally uplifting prose,

Whilst the quaint paper town tickets feed my childhood habit, my taste for (a hush befalls the room)

popular fiction.

Until today no humiliation worse than being caught in the town library and asked,

'So, what are you reading?'

Frantically obscuring the glossy paperbacks in my grasp,

I shift my weight from side to side and hedge,

unwilling to confess my crimes against the Canon,

dreading the quirked brow of surprise and dismay from my

inquisitive interlocutor.

But now my shuttered bookcases are thrown wide,

My once-hidden world exposed.

Poetic rehabilitation for the incorrigible:

'Hi, my name is _______, and I've read Bridget Jones' Diary'

August 2000, revised June 2005