there's a war inside my body
between my head and my heart
and with no end in sight
it threatens to tear me apart
because my heart says stay
love
endure
and hope
but my heart says cut
run
disconnect
and protect what is left of your heart

because being with you is a paradox
both endless bliss and torture
at once contentment and devastation
somehow heartache and perfect love
because my heart is a place you will always have a home
but i am cursed to be forever alone
a drifter
a bookbinder fixing broken hearts, rather than broken spines
somehow able to repair everyone
even the most devastated soul

everyone

except

myself

The untitled book on the floor,
With rips and tears on its couver.
A tattered spine.
Laying there, unnoticed,
in the fields of books
at the library.

Nothing can soothe the pain its felt.
But one can always reiterate the pain,
Or simply toss it into a hot box
Where it can burn slowly.

"It".
Of course, there's no other name for this book.
It has no title!
But does a book really need a title,
More than it does someone with one to read this book?
So it can flourish and receive a title,
So it doesn't experience all of this withering?

Perhaps.
But is that really what the book wants?
Is that really what the author wants?
The bookbinder? (Those still exist)
The reader themselves?

Or does this book want to be sold into
The battleground of merciless bloodshed,
Where its always going to be treated like a thing;
Rather than the contents of their character.

Quick to St Rita’s cold creaking pews

where throats were blessed

No rainbow’s bones caught

but walking reverie punished

with Alocoque’s Sacre Coeur

smothers communards’ ashes

             27 May 1871

Ate Pollux, forty francs for his trunk,

rats from 60 centimes

bread adulterated, catacombs’ milled

bone meal commons ate,

       where Sacre Coeur

raised up Commune began

Eugene Varlin, bookbinder

union organizer shot twice

Twenty to thirty thousand died thus
      
De Goncourt observes

solution brutal but next revolution

deferred a generation

Here beginning returned to,

only memory can go forward.