BIBLIONECROPHILIA

before you bury books
may i praise them?
not just the leather bound leisure reading
nor anonymous stacked volumes for lawyers offices
more the scruffy paperbacks bent and rag tagged
you carry in your back pocket like a song
their casual delinquencies authenticate our own-
ON THE ROAD,that Mark Chapman tome
held close as heroes golden lines
to define us in stranger times
We have our Orwells and our Beats
whose argot loaded streets /translated best
when dressed in casual paperbacks.Airport novellas sing
of weighty shallow dreams-we weigh time via tomes.
Our lives a sitcom script/itself as different
as every Penguin re-issued.Books are our history
We are judged by libraries/we are only as wise as the masters we imbibe
So even if they die,we share mortality.ipad and iphone less than text
and i do not mean messaging-more the right to dream
in private pages.READ ME! Books live-and so do we!