Are You A Library Book? Because I Want To Check You Out, Take You Home, Tear Your Jacket, Spill A Drink On You And Bring You Back Late

Written in collaboration with the creative genius Ward Clever. It’s such a challenge to keep up!

 

If I were a book and you opened me

You’d think someone had bound me wrong

While each chapter hangs coherent

The plot has lost its place

The crisis crests too early

Or perhaps, five chapters late

Some of the pages were left blank

Continuity errors make the story hard to follow

The quotes atop each chapter

Have nothing to do with the contents

My genre is unidentifiable

Every page is already dog-eared

My titles are misnomered

Despite audacious authoring

Writes and re-writes equally wrong

Editor in chief likely corrupt

My thesis antithetical

The metaphors eat themselves

The foreword was penned by an unknown

The preface tells you nothing

There are multiple endings

So you don’t know what I might do

Symbolism abounds

But no one knows what it means

Though I am the book

I cannot read it well

It must be written

In languages extinct

Translators misunderstood

My ambiguous complexity

You may study me fastidiously

Someone may have taken a word out

Or changed a word here and there

Notes in the margins

Put there by those who read me before

Their words are not my story

Past readers and reviewers

Skewed interpretation

I order and re-order

The pages and the chapters

Dusting off the jacket

In hopes of comprehension

My font is fantastic

My diction, delightful

The flyleaf is fecundity in white space

My binding seems weathered

Though I feel brand new

My story is ancient

I present all the trappings

Of literary masterpiece

Rich character development

Tragicomedic wendings

Astute observations

Scribed between the lines

In the screenplay adaptation

All the names and places

Will be changed

To protect the innocent

I also come in braille

So you can feel me

I want to be read with reverence

Tickle your fancy and funny bone

In least expected passages

As you dive deeply

Into my pages, rapt

With attention undivided

I want your bookmark left in me

As much as I want to leave a mark on you

My pages weathered and reread

Bringing you laughter and life

And as you finish my last page

We start a new chapter