A sad man sits in front of me in the library
He seems generic;
A used sketchbook, modern glasses, and a Banksy sticker on his MacBook.

His arms are filled with marks
black ink solemnly attempts to cover up what is underneath
But they are beautiful
An abstraction of two people kissing, entwined like the style of the art
Further up is his star sign;
Aries

Honest, courageous, passionate
Impatient, impulsive, intrusive
I don’t know if this is him;
All I know is his art, encompassing his every stroke
and carve

His left arm has a different mark
;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
What happened to you?

I shall fill the hole you left in my heart with books.
That way it can know what a happily ever after can be.

Tell me, are you a library, full of stories?
Are you a collection of fiction and fact that no arms could contain or no minds that could grasp?
I look into your eyes and I get a glimpse of the catalogs and genres which you keep within you.
You must have had your fair share of history; that is one textbook I want to study and memorize by heart.
Do you think I can be the one to take care of you?
I want to keep you a classic and as a monument in this era of advancing technology.
I will clear the dusty parts of your heart and wipe the slippery surface of your crying face.
I will caress every page you own and help restore the words you've been trying to preserve.
I may not be the one who found you first but I will be the one to stay by your side, until the day either of us crumbles.
So let me check your books out and let me return to you so very often.
Let me call you my favorite place and my second home.

Look -- O’ look
The books we could be;
Seas of lumber
Slumber in dusty sleeves.
Thieves of the night
Write on our eyes;
Lies in the form of words,
Worlds in forms of home.
Some call it fiction,
Imagination calls it sanity
Gravity of our own two feet
Meet to stay alive.
“Strive” it tells me.
“Be all that you can and more.
Doors lead to windows,
Intros to the Galaxy.
Actually living more lives than one.
Undo the restrictions-
Dictions people have over you.
Few are even close
Most will never get there.
Here there is only you
Through the woods behind the books

Consider for a moment
the Great Library of Alexandria,
a wonder of the ancient world
a pinnacle of human achievement,
a locus of human knowledge,
what with its endless papyrus scrolls
and torch-lit hallways
and hunched, bearded, sagacious men.

Consider now whether or not it
only contained about eighty gigabytes of data.

Consider Jesus.

Consider the thousands of Bible apps
(most of them free)
that are available for download onto your phone.

Consider the different translations that are available
at your fingertips,
each telling a divergent story,
each version of the messiah slightly different
in terms of humanity,
miraculous deeds,
skin tone—
and all of this distilled
into a single, trivial
press of a handheld device.

Consider yourself as you lie in bed
in the dark
trying to pray to God,
but too distracted by the fact
that a text message you sent earlier
never got a reply.

It's all in the cards,
So let's shuffle our deck,
And see what say our hearts.

Shuffle your deck,
Lay out the cards
And we'll find within the symbolism
Whether we're fleeting
Or meant to be.

And I be a liar if I said I trust cards
More than people,
But I definitely trust the books that hold stories of them
Infinitely more.

But these books,
They're my home.
I got to the library, the bookstore,
And please understand, that's my church.
Within those walls and these papers,
I find my truth and my guidance.
My gospel is To **** a Mockingbird,
My old testament is the complete works of Charles Dickens,
And my new testament is J.D. Salinger's Franny and Zooey.

I find prayer within Lord Byron,
And I seek guidance from Richard Bach.

So maybe it is all in the cards,
But if I could read the cards
As well as I read Edgar Allen Poe,
I'd be the most profound clairvoyant
In the history of history.

But I bet you
That when I seek prayer within Brent Weeks and Oscar Wilde,
Know that I'll find every reason to be with you
And none other,
And I'll see the beauty
Of our future
Together.

She had a story unlike any of the stories held in her hands. Her story was quite too messy to put into words. She's forgotten by the world, and surrounded by the disturbance of people.
        Some of the foam from her well filled coffee stains her upper lip. And she flips the page, to continue reading the story of another.
        She'll never get the confidence to talk to the gentlemen across the room. The one looking at her right now, smiling at her foamy lip, she wipes it off and blushes.
        Her head turns back to the pages, she hopes to find friends in the book she grasps in her hand. So she doesn't find the need to talk to the gentlemen across the room

I perused through the catacombs
gliding my fingers along your innumerate spines,
picked you up where you blossomed in my palm
and breathed archaic mysteries into my face.

I felt myself trembling
as I dared enter the hallowed corridors,
opening doors and peeking inside
in hopes to catch a semblance of your touch,
your taste,
your voice.

A fingerprint,
a coffee stain,
clues and the origins of bricolage
that left me breathless
and teary-eyed
as the weight of this sacred place
bore itself entirely upon me.

A part of your soul
encased within each one of your treasures:

I heard your stereo in a jazz history,
heard you ponder within Dostoyevsky,
saw your wry smile and charm within Fleming,
and your humor within Vaudeville--

and as I perused onward,
and the archetype bore itself naked in a holy privilege,
I closed myself within that impalpable bubble
and wept at the gates of Eden.

As I removed my hands from your ribcage,
and withdrew the breath from your nostrils,
walking away with your words and fragments of your soul
I soon realized--

You Are What You Read.

The bodies of paradise
are the fledglings of humanity--
little chicks
that peeped for love
and instead found
what we attempt to purge.

Which is reality
instead warping
and mourning
the placate scene
into what our creation
has never meant to be.

I've become fond of
literature and statutes
that line a facetious library.  

One which mangles
others from stepping inside
yet holds the truest heart.

My finest lines
are not those spoken
but those read
from paper or stone,

because
it is only
to those un-living
the crēvit are not divined
and which Veritas,
can come find
*Amor est vitae.