Poetic Insights

These Books Bide on Oak Shelves. Lisa Stice.

Fyodor’s broke-down superman broods,

disturbed by the un-crime;

moldering on a filthy sofa

in the half light

of his paranoia.

And Hunter S T, who travels the whole

of a shelf, cannot die

there for the troubled thoughts,

dark like hallucinated wings,

cure themselves with sober pureness

within the clean pages –

ink and page rejuvenate

the roaming recidivist

of highways.

Kerouac strikes a note

so lonely through the lonely end

of the shelf, whereupon the Beats,

gin juice haunts, wandering,

wayward men on roads like gray

ghosts, and desolated

angels quest after answers to nothing.

Protective dustiness buries

those Tom Hardy texts of torture

that hold captive

all the deluded sinners of

malcontent –

Jude too obscure, maddening crowds,

whores and black-tongued kids, lost idols;

they shun the penance prayer.

Organized fictitious lives

fleshed that they may rise

from bindings that cannot bind them.

These books breathe in me.