Page 641 Picador paperback edition
“I left Paris this morning”
And my own location now doesn’t interest me
All that matters is the emptiness
The hollowness one feels
After the back cover of the book
Slams like a prison gate
Leaving me an instant recidivist
Yearning for the paper dungeon
Of course I never believed my sentence
120 chapters covering the known
History of the world would ever end
Denied the rushing finish as surely as
Belbo ignored Diotallevi’s wasting illness
Failed to register how quickly my eyes
Scanned the lines a kayak caught
In the cascading currents of the plot
Until like a babe
Who had fought with all its might
To stay within its aqueous egg
I find myself obscenely
Outside the safety of the walls
Prescribed within the arc of
That omniscient Pendulum
Needing desperately to escape
The fiction of reality inside
A new reality of fiction