A Forgotten Book on a Shelf
My beginnings, an exposition in a true place,
home to a man who lets me collect dust
in an oak-paneled compartment
to forget another time, another setting,
landscapes beyond his front door-- he forgets the room
I truly belong, a room still hollow
with the echoing calls of climax. I rest here,
shelfed, a cardboard butterfly whose wings
fold limp upon the insides of my revelation,
evident in Times New Roman and covered
with a thick case of hard-back blue. Who knew
the conflicts that would arise rapid-fire, when he
and she clawed character flaws from each other's
eyes and I watched from my condo on the shelf,
sandwiched between some book about Christianity,
some book about personality--the readings
of a psychologist-in-training and my substantial
words, a remedy against the mental constraints
of reality existed like a forgotten getaway into magic,
into romance, into science fiction battles
on a starship cruising into the vastness counseling
could not recuperate and did not explain--I was clearly
her book. And he left me here, my woody scent
blending into dust, forgotten the moment she resolved
to stamp invisible footprints into concrete slabs,
past the scribbled momentos of some stranger on basement floors--
it was obvious there was no harlequinn left between them--
and he continued to ignore me until the dog-ear
on my insides left a crease in my heart, and when she called
him and asked to have me back, to return her
literary creativity, her nonfiction fiction, that novel
sample of a blip, of an out of world experience
she lent him did he know, do you think, what I knew?
Does he know the lost learnings of happy endings,
that there was no way to truly forget the last chapter
of the last book in all its splendid volume,
and I felt the surge of life in their character
as he walked to her front door, and she opened it,
and when their two hands passed my spine
I could feel the tingle of conclusion in my pages.
No comments:
Post a Comment