I sit between two books -- two tomes:
Les Miserables to my right
And, to my left, Infinite Jest,
Wondering how I got here.
Not a metaphor. Not my chair.
Books as ends in themselves.
Never read the Wallace.
Read Les Mis a million years ago.
Infinite misery. Unrepentant cruelty.
Mirrors back on the world of monsters
are really black swirls of anti-matter.
Books meant democracy, freedom
from autocrats and preachers of world’s ends;
Books valued experience brought to life
in the performance of pages staged in the mind.
Books gave us the smashmouth double-bind,
especially if the writer was unreliable and intended
to get you lost, confounded, and free. Books
are like God. Useful and fey, until you put them down,
and you toss them out with the gramophones
one spring day, when butterflies are flitting
in glass jars anxious to get the fuck out
of the discarded Jiffy peanut butter tomb
and be free.
In lieu of those, vitals in talk, the sense that your talker has unidentifiable viscera they are licking back stuck left in their teeth. We give more than we ever could steal, the haunted homebody most of us. Viva freedom why be pursued by nonentities apparitions if we are bodies at home? Kafka wanted the 20th century spared his fictions. You write like a direwolf, bullmoose in pique, knocking expressions clean off smug faces. Indicators point to every open road that the cool body of the people stopped bathing in book ink. I h been waiting for the sarcastic idiomatic put-downs from the 20th cent. But those came from fast talkers, noo Talkers if we accept Nelson Algren's direction. In jail for twelve days was given four new nicknames, making me Willy Wonk. You are in for that kind of name magic on this road names layers deep. Fordite the jewel. Maybe 19 year olds the authors of the finger quotes "book".