Bookcase City

In my room I have four bookcases.

That isn't to say I don’t have only four bookcases worth of books.

There are stacks of stories cluttered on my desk,

Fables and Fictions filling my floor space. 

I've always liked the idea of walking among these pages so precariously perched in my mind,

Bound paper stacks pose as skyscrapers, 

Their interior office cubicles containing billions of syllables,

Ink imprints are radioactive on the pages,

Their atomic infrastructure explodes in the dimensions of your imagination.

And sometimes,

They leave a small boy,

Clutching a pillow,

Wondering what to do with his life

After completing Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

Or the Lord of the Rings Trilogy,

Or that one book he found in the back of the library.

He has devoted every part of his being into these characters,

Felt them breathing down his neck as he lay reading,

Stayed up and had clever conversations exploring their thoughts on science and religion,

And held them in his hands for hours on end,

Books are dead lovers.

We hang on to their last breath,

They have built up to their death with the last will and testament of our capacity to move forward,

Use the information we receive to help us become a better person,

Like a story book character,

We’ll be wrapped around simple sentence configurations,

Accompanied by pictures that put us in the constraint of context,

It isn't about being able to define someone,

It’s about understanding where they come from,

Because I come from the fictitious facilities of being 5,

I still wade in the pool of memories collected over those years,

I remember having several random objects and toys that could somehow coexist in an imaginary world known as my living room.

I come from the days spent imagining we weren't so small,

That the electrodes boiling in our brains weren't so unimportant in the grand scheme of things,

I've noticed this in the outlines of scenic pictures,

A landscape of unimaginable lengths,

Filled with the lore of our storybooks,

I've noticed that in these digital photos,

Our imagination is that one pixel.

That pixel that is a different shade then those around it,

The one that just,

Makes the picture unique.

The possibilities are infinite,

 Only defined by what we find in our hearts,

Not by the printed folds of any book,

But we all try to explain it,

We all try to draw straight lines with these closed eyes,

We haven’t realized it isn't about defining anything,

It’s about understanding where it comes from.

I come from a book I published in my sleep,

Where I rewrote the pages so many times,

I've forgotten all the lies I've scribbled in the margins.

Where time seemed to bend with the binding,

And it felt like a lifetime of waiting to find out what I wanted to say,

I have something to say,

I search authors for answers and see if they've already said it.

I've been looking for the nucleus of an idea to blow me away,

For buildings to come crashing to my feet,

When I figure out how to tell you…

I don’t know who I am.

That is why I pour myself into characters shoes,

Trying to find a size that fits,

Something that makes sense.

Fiction is easy to perceive when you aren't looking for the truth,

Instead,

Looking for another world out there in-between two covers.

Some bookcase city looking for a story to tell.