Library Guy

With the enormity of holding keys, the anxiety of secret Sunday morning when no one ever comes the first hours

or late Monday when the sleep sets in on the studious and they clear out

that par-lit time the stacks have mass, get weight, hang heavy off a low-watt bulb

dead man- and spunky woman-names show on the spine, or in deep footnotes

stamping the place like a caught lover

me just being the sentry, acting the watch, my bowel holding a cosmos of ghosts, the knot of human mind I don't know my own

my walkabout a rendezvous with a fear that if I lie down I never rise, that there's only my walking then nothing

that the odd ideas smelling of thread and binding glue, they're the only real,

that, and the frontispiece of a dragon folded with a pencil note:  my home

.