Food For Thought

I look behind me and I see
Dusty drapes
Tainted by the sun in late afternoons.
Forest colours backdrop knowledge on shelves.
A massive book stares half-open, sage-like,
At the burned out lightbulb above it,
Wishing to see a face filled with curiosity,
A student by nature
To flip its shredded and sickly pages.
And find a new word such as
“Epanalepsis”
An echo.

Information echoes throughout
The myriad of coarse and slick covers.
Between bumpy, torn, sun-burnt pages,
And hues of flames, jungles, and rivers
mixing together like the ultimate painting.
Swiped precisely to form the supreme brain stimulate.
Food for thought.

My eyes jump from title to title
With that same feeling of recognition
And shock when you realize you’ve missed that step
And you’re about to come crashing to the ground.
But then another book catches me:
Reason Awake, sixth shelf up,
Subdued title, hiding behind its sunshine screen
When it should be screaming to be read.

Trailing my hand over titles and golden pages of
Emerson’s Self-Reliance and Other Essays
And all books that followed after it and before it,
I suddenly wished osmosis worked with words,
To suck in through curves and creases of my finger tips
Turn blue by blood,
As if needed more than oxygen.
Past my eyes and passion, a brilliant spark, to the mind
And then…
Ah, I’m full.
But maybe just one more.

02/01/2006