The Library for Real!
Posted to Poetry
by Cohen on 2002-03-07 12:19:00
"Shush - be quiet, you're in a library," hisses the brooding bitter colonial.
Deep instinct lurches inside like lightening,
A LIBRARY'S NO PLACE FOR SILENCE!
NO, its ideas roar - the great lion for real.
Alive, a library is organic,
jungling with foreign leaves
and vines for swinging, and old
bare spines under thick rancid rot.
And tripping down isles like beaten paths,
the head lurches this way and that.
Eyes flicker, hearts convulse.
You startle as a spooked title flutters from hiding,
exposing eyes like film for National Geographic.
Inside, the ruined mind rattles with fallen chips
of folklore, treasure, tales of terror, and tremors
on the ancient hill of philosophy, while you slither though
rivers of ink, meeting exotics of splendour,
on a mission to find Kurtz.
Sources have heard round campfires,
"He's lost, like Nietzsche, it's the madness!"
Numbers have been sent for him,
their legend's ceremonially recorded
in rhythmic barbarian blabber,
on fences of critical spears
hang decorative skulls.
Yes, a library is a wild carcass,
rank and lucid as a long passed hippopotamus,
networked with glowing orbs buried in black
like underground Orc.
A sweet native found me, a coiled cobra attacked by the intruder,
"Child, a biblioteque's heavy air,
solid and aged as wine and cheese,
is a saltering Dionysian tiger.
Fit not only for whispers wispy as scratchy whiskers,
but home to poisonous wails,
and erupting river rapid HOWLs!"
Soothingly she whispers, "Beware."
