I’m in the library
It’s where I want to be
Here I’ll find my bliss.
Between the walls lined with books
Whose covers I won’t kiss.
This place is scary,
Now that my librarian died,
I hide amongst the bookshelves
And shield myself with the stacks
Of never rebound books.
There is no Book of Life in this collection.
Just a library of struggle
And a bibliography of attempts
And a useless reference work.
The catalogues can give direction
And the descriptions can be read
But they offer small satisfaction. Because
the synopsizes are misleading
For those who are reading
The receding texts of yesteryear.
As I stroll down the isles
Judging books by their covers
My mind starts spinning
In the google of ideas.
I begin looking for the illustrated version,
With the diagrams and charts.
Who am I kidding?
By scanning the miles
Of organized piles
For the Book of the Living.
Where are the writers?
The editors? The illustrators?
And where is my librarian?!
Come be my guide, in those corridors
Of endless information.
Show me the route to my shelf
So I can see the text
That guides the perplexed
Out of this forest of scribes.
I’m looking for life
Illustrated and annotated
By the expert in the field.
But in the library nobody can hear you think.
If you ascended that ladder
You already sacrificed the matter
At the alter of blank pages and drying ink.
The smoothness of those sheets tickle my fingertips
The letters dance like a tango in rehearsal
And the books spines smile to me
Like a lover in a dream that lasts too short.
Yeah, life was an open book, once upon a story
Then it became an unfinished piece of work
And now it’s a project that still has no name.
I promise to write, I promise to read.
These commitments only made sense before I came.
The library day ends at the start of the one to come
That still gives me few hours
To search the towers
For the Book of Life
I know I won’t find.
I hear people in the cafeteria
Caught in a laughing hysteria about milk that spilled
They will never understand;
They never met
The librarian I killed.
