Tag Archives: The Daily Addiction prompt

Books (For Daily Addictions July 21, 2018 prompt of Obsolete)

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Books

The fresh bookstore smell of them,
bending the pages to crack the spine,
notes scribbled in the margins,
underlines,
hearts with initials on the flyleaf,
something to loan or to wrap for a gift,
something propped up on the bathtub edge,
its paper sprinkled with drops-—
pages wrinkled into a Braille memory—
that rainstorm run through,
how he put it in his back pocket.

Poetry touched by fingers.
Single words met by lips.
Words pored over by candlelight or flashlight
in a sleeping bag or in a hut with no electricity.
Books pushed into backpacks
and under table legs for leveling.

Paper that soaked up
the oil from fingers
of the reader
consuming popcorn
or chocolate chip cookies
in lieu of the romance on the pages—
finger food served with brain food.
Passions wrapped in paper and ink—
the allure of a book and the tactile comfort.
The soul of a book you could touch, fold, bend.

Books are the gravestones of trees
but also the journals of our hearts.
Cities of words,
boards and bricks of letters,
insulated by hard covers or the curling skins
of paperbacks.
Something solid to transfer the dreams
of one person to another in a concrete telepathy
of fingers and eyes.
Books are the roads we build between us,
solid and substantial—
their paper the roadbed,
the words the center lines directing us.

What will fill the bookcases of a modern world?
Wikipedia replacing dictionaries,
Google already an invisible bank of Encyclopaedia Britannicas.
What will we use our boards and bricks for,
if not to hold up whole tenements of books?
How will we furnish our walls?
What will boys carry to school for girls?
What will we balance on heads
to practice walking with perfect posture?
What will we throw in the direction of the horrible pun?

Will there be graveyards for books, or cities built of them?
Quaint materials for easy chairs or headboards for beds?
Will we hollow them out for cigar boxes
or grind them up for packing material?
Where do books belong in the era of Kindle and Audible?
These dinosaurs that soon will not produce more eggs.
Perhaps they’ll grow as precious as antiques.
Perhaps the grandchildren of our grandchildren
will ponder how to open them. Will wonder at their quaintness,
collecting them like mustache cups or carnival glass,
wondering about the use of them—as unfathomable as hieroglyphics.
That last book closing its pages—one more obsolete mystery
fueling the curiosity of a bygone era that has vanished
into a wireless universe.

search
search-1Yes, you are right.  These are chairs made out of books.

In response to The Daily Addictions prompt of obsolete  Of all the technologies that have gone extinct in your lifetime, which one do you miss the most?

The Daily Addictions prompt is obsolete.

First Kiss

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First Kiss

“Allemande left, allemande right.
Promenade your lady, hold her tight!”
Years later, I recall demands
for touching waists and holding hands.
To “Promenade. Go ’round the world.”
We do-si-doed and faced and whirled.
Square-dancing was called to blame
the day I first encountered shame.

Just six years old and mild and meek,
a boy my age dared peck my cheek.
His mother pulled him off the floor,
then jerked him rudely out the door,
shaming him with words and action
before I knew my own reaction,
which might have merely been a measure
of a friendly mutual pleasure.

Instead, for twelve more years together,
held as classmates in close tether,
much as I perhaps desired
that we might have again conspired,
he never tried what once was censured.
Another kiss was never ventured

’til in our twenties, home from college,
emboldened by our further knowledge,
home briefly for summer vacation,
heartened by a small libation,
finding ourselves in darkened car
up on a hill, his mother far
away in town, we finally kissed,
discovering what we had missed.

Then we went our separate ways—
that one night just a summer’s phase.
Years later, though, I still recall.
that first kiss, and his mother’s gall
over what was a gentle theft
prompted by an “Allemande left.”


The “guilty parties” are, it is true, pictured above, but I’m not one to kiss and tell. This true memory was prompted by today’s “Daily Addiction” prompt of promenade.