the rocking chair creeks on the back porch.
she cradles The Hobbit in her lap,
sips black tea and brings the joint to her lips,
carried away in an airborne ship of smoke
to Middle-Earth, an escape
from the tedium of 9-to-5s,
consumerism and bored housewives.

the cars **** by but she can’t hear.
she slips through the fabric of time
and space to the upside down. flipped
around with another page to hang
on the precipice of bliss implicit
in every interlocking sentence.

here, words cannot hurt, only heal.
within these holy septs, sacred texts
lead us to truths beyond the veil.
she who reads
has lived a thousand lives
in a fraction of the time.

i want to dive behind her cold brew eyes
and peruse the passages of synaptic gaps,
meandering along neurological paths,
for not all who wander are lost.
the human mind is like your favorite book—
once it’s been opened,
it can never again be truly closed.