Eulogy

The Internet has set a fire beneath my bookcase. The higher reaches of my room are stormclouding with smoke. Soon I will be forced into a crouch. And then into a prone position, pressed low against the carpet weave.

I could leave the room, of course, but I won’t.

I will stay here and keep writing.

I watch as each still-living book breathes in the smell of the unfortunates, the ones already afflicted with the flames. Breathes in the smell, the charry, soot-saturated ghosts of them. Catches the disease of their burning. Covers wrinkling, fuses timing down to the explosion. The pages all consumed at once, in no particular order; the list of their contents un-consulted by the blaze.

I have saved one.

Grabbed it just before the spark leapt free and hunted out the well-stacked memories of my dreams and my learning.

It is by Ray Bradbury.

I read it as the storm clouds darken, as the fire goes white and then whiter still with the heat. I am not rushing, but already I am halfway through.

I have read it before, but do not recall the feel of it being quite this way. It shocked before, certainly, but seemed somehow far-fetched. I think perhaps I did not want to face it. Now, it has a desperate urgent honesty about it. Not science fiction, but history almost.

This has already come to pass, I say out loud, and inhale smoke.

My words barely form a status update, barely constitute a tweet.

They are so insubstantial that I repeat them, repeat them, repeat them, all the while inhaling inhaling inhaling and coughing and coughing and coughing and It has already come to pass I call out with rusty undervalued vocal cords, and tears turn black upon my cheeks. I know because I raise my fingers to them, examine, through the haze, the tips.

Ink.

Weeping ink and breathing fire. I am become, already, a brace of mythic, fantastic things. Dragons and books. I am scared to reach up to my forehead lest I find a horn, scared to look down at my legs lest I discover them fused and sequined all across with scales and remnant sheen of ocean. Seaweed wrapped around me, crackling and jumping just like popcorn in the heat.

I read, I read.

I write.

I think.

I mourn.

I think.

I feel.

I feel

funny

faint

fey

foolhardy

forgettable

forgetful

fallible

flammable

false

forgetting everything

forgotten in and of myself

and now the clouds have sunk so low that I must crouch, even as I sense my hair catch aflame the same as paper. Even as it hurts, I find a balm, a panacea in that. To be like paper. To be capable of holding thoughts, of showing them, of yellowing and weakening with age and yet still retaining most of what I know or knew. Of coming from a seedling, and then being malleable enough to return at final page’s closing to compostable matter, fed back, with dignity, into the soil, to form a bed from which other seedlings might arise and other paper thereby be acquired, and acted on, and added to, and written on and read and read and read.

And on all fours now, I struggle to maintain focus, and my ink drops down and runs and swims around on top of that already printed, and I rapid-breathe the enormous hulk, the awesome mass of shadow that the books expel once they’re done burning. They fill my lungs and crowd and jostle in my blood, and they are, undoubtedly, a part of me, and becoming moreso by the moment.  

I read.

I lay down prone, the clothes upon my back incinerating.

I read.

I sweat ink as well as weeping it, and all of it is steam as soon as it hits surface, rising to meet the weighty pall halfway.

If this is how it has to be

I say out loud

inhale

If this

I say

inhale

I read

the punctuation catching fire first and then the keener more ambitious more inventive words and then the capitals the proper nouns the names for things the names that are important were important but become within this burning just one more place or one more person amongst a host and

none of them

are golden daffodils

the first poem

i can remember

knowing

wordsworth

bradbury

cormac

shakespeare

marlowe 

hank bukowski

conrad

ernest

dylan

kundera

m ondaatje

zuzak

pratchett

frank ohara

jack

jack

kerouac

beat poets

modernists

postmodernists

realists

fantasists

readers

writers

digitized

splitscreen

distraction

distancing

denial just

a little

of the possibility

that any of it

means anything at

all

its

just words

and madeupstories

and those stories are

not the real world

and they are not

the digital world

the better

everyonetogether

world

either

and so they dont

matter and can be

spared and let

them disappear

and scatter their ashes

far out at sea

where nobody

will bother to

visit and weep

for them mourn

for them

write and read aloud

or in their precious

head a eulogy

a little prayer

though not one particular

to any faith

only a clutch a

sacred fragile

gathering of words

to ask with

desperate urgent honesty

for somehow

grass to rise

above their resting

place and

somehow

for even one

just one more

seedling to discover

the bliss of

the daylight

and grow 

From a stone

You take the small exit. The door only open today because it is sunlit outside, because it would be too warm in the shop otherwise. You take the exit and return to the side-street. Shoe-battered flagstones. Loudness of footsteps amplified, it seems, by the shadows that crowd between this building and the building facing.

You walk out into the street, walk along it with the pockets of your jacket – conspiring to make it hotter still – laden, chock-full with books. Weighted, as though with stones on your way to the river.

Only, different.

If these are stones, then they are stones from which you can easily draw blood. Blood and warmth – not like sunshine, but similar – and voices and words. And songs, and company, and recipe lists. And chemicals, it seems, that spark off passions in you. Feed both lust and intellect in equal measure.

The things of living, fixed and held steady for a time, so as you might think more closely on them. Bearhug them tightly, cut off from the slipstream and the traffic and the conveyor belt crowds.

Stones that can flip the world, and nature’s ever onwards-marching order, so that, instead of sinking you, they carry you up.

They clatter against your hips as you enter the plaza, leave shadows and echoes behind for the day. The clatter gains pace as you come nearer the station, more eager than ever to get home and read. 

Bullshit Vengeful Soup Can #1

Used to have a

novel in me, like

that palefaced fucker

Warhol promised me

I would, and it was

good, and then I

brought it to the

surface, put key

in lock of cage and

let it, shabby,

clamber loose, and

I don't feel as though

I have a novel in me

anymore.

Bookhugger

Maybe it's because it used to be trees, and when things get written on trees it means love. Quiet crunching of penknife or sharp tip of housekey into bark to mark out ME + YOU inside a heartshape with an arrow passing through it. Maybe that's why it's always adventure and wildness, this book-holding feel. Maybe that's why it's always a comfort, and wanting to create your own book is simply akin to wanting to feel closer to what people have longtime called nature. Wanting things to start out like saplings in dirt, with your fingertips packing that dirt tight at their base. Setting them firm in the face of the wind. Watering them when the skies go too long without rain. Watching it. Camping beside it, sleeping bag in its shadow and watching it grow. Watching cycle of sun and moon overhead. Noting seasons, thickening, roughening of bark. Watching and waiting, once the things are full grown, for the glinting and crunching of housekeys and penknives, and for words to be read out from the tree like paired lists of lovers' names.

Lives in a low-down shoebox

Of course you're compelled

by the perfect

storm of black words on

white page with which

the book opens,

or which you open the book to find,

and of course, once those

words have settled in a

right-seeming

order,

you ease back into your

chair, your pillow, your

mattress,

transfixed.

The perfect storm gathers

into rougher, stranger shapes, an

almost mechanically intricate

typhoon, and you note

all of the things that

the gusts of it blow and beat back and batter and

you are astounded that such things as this can

happen as the weather-

bringing pages turn,

turn, turn,

and you watch, of course,

the typhoon build up into

a maelstrom - you know,

the galaxial kind,

the standard-issue universal type -

with colours that human eyes

can only touch through

the telescopes and kaleidoscopes

we make,

spinning like Scylla's

vortex water,

pirouetting dazedly and drunkenly and delightfully

between the opposing

cliff-faces

that make up and are made up of

the soft-cardboard

covers of this

book, this book,

this flattened-shoebox

object,

this thing that is, of course,

a perfect form.