Day 26: Performance Poem to Corruptions (an unread book)
21 Jul 2011 1 Comment
in Letters
Jim Shea sponsored me to write a love letter to Corruptions: A Novel of Washington.
I have not yet read Jim’s book, although my parents were at the Australian Embassy in Washington in the late 70s and I’m quite curious to explore Jim’s Washington (purchasable on Amazon).
So here is my love letter to a delicious and mysterious thing. An unread book. Go to and explore something new and outside your normal reading habits today!
It is a performance poem, so it will probably work better spoken out loud with a variety of tempos, extreme enthusiasm and hand flailing.
Love letter to Corruptions: a Novel of of Washington
Book
BOOOOOOOOOK!
Book
Reddit reddit reddit reddit
Haven’t read it
Oooooooh….
Once upon a time in a book I read the words:
“You have so many books, have your read them all?”
“No, what’s the point in that?”
A house of books where all are read is a sad decay
A chainlink fence, a dog locked in the laundry for life
The end of a life and a steady regurgitation.
Cud chewed brings fresh digestion, fresh insight
But even the cow pauses in its contemplative upchuck to find fresh pasture.
Book.
Booooooook!
Words, in a book
With a structure or a struggle
Thought, theme, reason and unreason.
Book to hold and touch and taste
Book unread, spine uncreased
Virginal on the shelf next to a battered second hand Kafka, an oversized Bizzarro World and an upside down copy of Tender Morsels
Washington book
Book about a place I have seen through windows
Always windows but never touching
Windows opening up on people and places
Revealing, concealing to desecrate and celebrate
As sacred and profane weave their giddy dance of illumination.
Book
Boooook, unread book, unfamiliar author
What will you do to me book?
Upset me? Depress me? Invigorate? Stimulate? Ejaculate like I’m Rachel Bloom reading Bradbury?
Will my reading be obsessional, professional, cool collected, sad rejected, whirring past as an hour becomes a minute as I chase the page with words tumbling fumbling through fingers into brain in the fire of an afternoon gone and a book done? Will it chew so dense I’ll need a nap in the sun after five pages so filling I can’t move, crawling my way through, each word a meal?
Each page a day at the gym, synapses sore from lifting new ideas, muscles torn down to rebuild the familiar made weird from the weight of new thought as dense as time at the DMV with a baby crying.
Who will I be, what will I become, will I be changed?
All I want from a book is to fall in love and be transformed.
That’s all I want from the sweat of your brow to my eyeball scrawling your words.
All I want is to crawl inside your head and sup all that is to be supped
transformed in and out and see the world afresh.
Book of windows, of unread worlds
What will you give me when I give you my mind?
One Comment (+add yours?)