books
I've read all these books. All of them.
Every chapter, every page, every word.
I read the back covers, the prefaces,
the forwards, the author's bios.
I even glanced at the indexes and
bibliographies when they were there.
This took place over many years.
I studied the front covers,
the images, the designs, the fonts.
I've gotten used to the feel in my hands,
the weight, the thickness.
I've bent corners back into place and
taped or glued pages that fell out.
I've seen these books, glancing around
in momentary thoughtlessness,
lying wherever I had last set them,
or on the bookshelf where they've
sat for years, and been pulled into the past,
into the life I lived when I first read them,
or even when and where I acquired them.
I've read all these books.
I read them in this apartment, in my last
apartment, in all my apartments.
I read them in coffee shops, where people
came and went and chatted with friends.
I read them on the beach, on the side
of the road, on park benches and sitting
in my car when I had time to kill.
I read them in the house I grew up in,
in my bedroom when summer was in full swing,
which made me feel like I was missing some thing,
and I read them in the basement there on an old
black couch that's long since been thrown away.
(Maybe every house has a couch like that,
some quiet corner where you sometimes stay.)
I run my fingers over the spines, pick them up,
flip through the pages, and try to remember.
The World Doesn't End. The Procession.
The Gown of Glory.
A Brief History of Time.
(The books I've read could tell you
a little bit about the history of mine.)
Myth and Reality. Castles of the World.
American History Revised.
Tesla, the Wizard of Electricity.
The Politics of Ecstasy.
(I got that from someone I spent one day
with and never saw again.)
Rumi. Howl. The Century. The Jungle.
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn,
and Things Fall Apart.
War and Peace, and War All The Time.
The Lord of the Rings. Stephen King.
Comic books I used to get in the mail.
(Is that even still a thing?)
Jonathan Livingston Seagull, ahh,
that book made me want to soar.
And The Little Prince, a little book
that left me wanting more.
I've read all these books and no one cares,
unless they've read the same book too.
That's the only way someone could ever understand
what occurred between a book and you.
~
2025