My Books

My Books

“How many books in your bag, Dad?”
“One or two, usually”, I replied.
“There’s two hundred in mine”

And I felt that two hundred books would weigh heavier than a clerical conscience.
I was wrong.
My son reads on a Kindle,
But the words are the same.

My son’s books measure seven, by five, by half an inch thick,
With a weight of twelve ounces.
All rendered in metric, of course.

My books are dinosaur huge and ponderous,
Ravenous and bloated with owls and snakes, ancient machines and bellies full of woodland crafts.
Constipated with rigid philosophies, pompous poems and David Bowie’s costumes.

My books are tiny, lost and scared survivors,
Hiding between the pages of larger books for safety and content by osmosis,
Shy with occult wisdom, flicked-through fierce with sharp nonsense-true teeth.

My books are fat, and thin, and muscular.
Lifting kettlebell recipes and singing deaf and dumb songs in coded coda form.
They dance without moving, but their sweat still lingers.

My books gather like hooligan starlings,
Forcing their perch to bend to a smile,
While they screech out a cacophony of aphorisms and half-remembered puns.

My son’s books are accessible,
Clear, clever, easy to read fonts,
Sizes that can be increased for the hard of seeing.

My books are elderly yellow, cranky, disabled,
Broken-spined, delicate as egos, and leaf-dropping
Like a windy October day

My books are wailing newborns demanding for demanding’s sake,
Carrying typographical birth defects and preciously misaligned prints.
Illustrations that baby-crawl from page to page.

My books are abused and misused, gaslit
By the banal graffiti of an idiot academic’s pencil and the wiser toddler’s blue crayon.
The carry the signatures of ghosts, and the ghosts of activities long since illegal.

My books are treasures that hold treasures, real ones and fake,
Fabergé eggs hiding home-made paper pumpkins.
My books are offal to be flung away with force and frustration.

My son’s bag carries two hundred books,
Sifted and distilled into pixel and desiccated data.
My shelves are crowded with a thousand dusty friends,
But the words are the same.

 

November 2023

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