New Poem #23

A prehistory: library-goer, just fine, free day, his self-worthying idea of leisure, when: it comes like a spell, spoken elsewhere, afflicting him. Rendering him cloudlike, expansive, and oh, the books! Voluminously oppressive waiting speakers of versions, versions, versions, all things subheliotic. Hideously reductive patient knowers of knowledge, it’s become a morgue, that smell which he once loved, and now down he goes, carpet, a whole faceful. Nose flared out, flattened, returning stale breath like a charitable amnesiac, all is distant, unmeaning. For all he knows, the shelves have collapsed upon him, for all he knows, he is a book.