Oh, OK.
So I read a poem today with the high schoolers
that I had never read that I wrote on the plane over here,
and I was hoping to try it again in a different quality
of discerning ears.
That sound cute?
Great.
Love this call and response we are having.
But I got to find it first.
OK, excellent.
Does anyone freak out in bookstores?
Yeah.
Yes.
OK.
Yeah, that's what this is about.
All right.
This is called "Having Nervous Breakdowns in Bookstores."
OK.
"Not the same quality of shit I lose in shopping malls--
rolling eyes back at targeted advertisements,
vision blurred out around the edges--
nor the same quality of shit I lose
in museums, where the pomp of the animal of the art
makes my organs contract as I attempt to lick
all the paintings back to life.
No, this is something else entirely and something
entirely else, predictable as a moon landing.
I've witnessed numerous people dragged screaming out of stores
by petrified and untrained booksellers, one man last week
trailing his pants behind him after upending
an entire popular non-fiction display.
I, too, have been asked to leave by nervous underpaid employees.
My sincerest apologies.
Pacing in basements, carrying on entire conversations
with common bibles, what is it that does it?
To be alive around all these living ideas
written by the dead into dead trees, stacked
in their hand-me-down jackets, forgotten,
collecting dust like grandchildren;
to be faced both with what will no longer be read
and how you, too, will be replaced after you're dead.
So many times, I wanted to die, I went to the bookstore
instead.
In the midst of some red obsession
or depressed as a book laid out flat on its back staring up
into unconcerned eyes, still I drag
me there to walk the aisles like a bride,
to talk to all my dead husbands, visit their abandoned friends,
put them back."
Cool.
Oh, thank you.