If you’d like to be included in this slot, please get in touch: estherchilton@gmail.com. Poems can be up to 60 lines and prose 2000 words. If you’d like to add a short bio and photo, then great. All I ask is that there’s nothing offensive.
My guest this week is a Writers Bureau student I’ve got to know over the years. Please give a warm welcome to Susan Batten. Susan’s writing has come on brilliantly over the years, her poetry in particular. I’m trying to encourage her to create a collection. Here are two fun pieces:
Sauce Bottles
By
Susan Batten
I’m ‘a sauce bottle reader’,
for I cannot resist
reading every last word,
to the end of the list.
I will read all the gen.
for the course I won’t take.
I will read through instructions
for the cakes I won’t bake.
I must follow their urging,
reading candidates’ rote,
I will know their advice,
even though I won’t vote.
All the ads in the pop-ups,
all the things we should try,
taggers’ work on the buildings,
I just can’t pass them by.
Foreign tongues don’t deter me,
I will read in them, too.
I will take all the flyers
to read in the loo.
On the Tube trains which rattle
down dark tunnels of dread,
I will go glassy-eyed
till it’s read and re-read.
I know all of the shop names,
the warnings and signs,
for I never stop reading,
from the first to last lines.
I’m a sauce bottle reader -
there, let it be said,
with a whole world of words
going round in my head.
And here’s another:
Who’s this?
A writer who’s read every day
by patrons quite willing to pay.
She dashes out pages
and has done for ages,
but publishers here have no say.
***
Image quote: Pinterest
Esther Chilton 
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