I GIVE AWAY SOME OF YOUR BOOKS

I give away some of your books;

a bag full of books. Not those

of strong emotional value, not those

that could fetch a price in used books' store;

no, just books that have no worth

beyond the words printed on their page

and the lesser, lingering, connection

they have to you. Your hands

have held them, your fingers

changed their pages. You

have read them, entered their worlds and

they have lived in your minds,

mixed with the thoughts and images of us.

We and the books were, fleetingly,

connected in you. So I give away

part of you, and part of us in you.

People we have never known and never will

will pick them up, read them

to escape their sickness, the fear gnawing

as real as the pain eating them,

and they will enter worlds similar

yet not the same as ours; a multiverse

exists through books, endless variation

co-created with each mind reading them.

Their hands will held them,

their fingers shall change the pages

where your fingers moved them once.

A slight, slight connection

between lives ended and lives

balanced between existence and the void,

or already ending, grasping

at the world slipping away. 

These books of yours I gave away,

a web of connection between mortal minds

and mortal hands, a spider's web

of illness and death, and what

reaches beyond the dying flesh

into some fragile unity of minds,

an immortality beyond individual fate;

culture, the crown of our species, not

some dusty carved heads atop a bookcase,

but the books in the case,

the multiverses, branching through each brain

which before the light goes unites with then,

the collective web woven by humankind

through each live flickering in the cosmic night,

flickering in the wind between the minds.

04.04.2018