Wednesday, April 7, 2010

a leper in the library

the library is a labyrinth, coursed with hidden stairwells, archives, broody basements, over-hangs of academia and under-places that have never seen sunlight.

in my tentative ventures through these hallowed halls i have been sure to tread carefully. the guardians of the library's prized collections do not take kindly to clumsy footfalls. they look up and glare at me as my feet echo in the scholarly silence of bent-over heads and frantic pen strikes.

in dark and confidential places hide the voices of centuries of thinkers. bearded men who devised the workings of social order, affronted women who insisted they were human too. bards and poets and playwrights who wrote for love and loved to write,
and the critics who remarked.

held hostage in the great tunnels of the mind. asleep between the bookshelves, lost somewhere between the classics and metaphysical. trying to find the exit but adrift and consumed by the ten-hundred folded theories. as i slip between the bookshelves I am pursued by some terrible monster. the beast that lives deep in the basement and feeds off the yellowing pages of ancient volumes. it is the underground fiend that seeks to slink up from behind and rob me of my purpose.

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