Books

We stacked the books in cardboard boxes. There were many, many books, all different types of books. We had not seen so many books. We were shocked at how many books had been constructed, books on how to kill and how to copulate even how to micturate and defecate. Books by the best minds of their generations. A book is a medium for recording information in the form of writing or images, typically composed of many pages (made of papyrus, parchment, vellum, or paper) bound together and protected by a cover. In the books we found earwigs and cockroaches and spiders and cobwebs and dust and leaves and the odd dry flower. For this poem I blame One Thousand and One Nights and Aladdin’s Wonderful Lamp and Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves and The Seven Voyages of Sinbad the Sailor and Miscellaneous Morsels from Youyang by Tuan Ch’eng-Shih and Les 120 journées de Sodome. We destroyed many books. Books disintegrated in fingers. Some metamorphosed into butterflies only to dissipate. Now they were dead the books were just books.

Lexi Velexa