Car Crash

A dark room with a small wooden desk, no lamp A thick pad of paper and a typewriter, never used Like a museum exhibit, though they aren’t allowed to gather dust And dead flies and moths, a pack of playing cards I never learnt to play, but still they’ve turned yellow with age The shelves full of books, thumbed and read a million times The pages fall out sometimes onto the slanted shelf, broken The cascade of over-used books falling into each other A literary car crash The carpet burnt by years of clumsiness, dark and worn The ceiling stained by years of nicotine, the cigarette smoker Looking on at a world frozen, the books are the only living things Read a million times and thumbed to death, the dirty pages blending into each other The faces and the timeless, frozen authors and poets, trapped here forever In the corner, a lonely television set, never used and not even plugged in The lonesome keyboard, beaten a million times, my voice recorded The German tongue, screamed above piano murder, the manslaughter of my violin A cultural car crash The curtains, white to ivory to ashen, unopened in an age Time to let the world come in through the never-before-seen window I sit upon the bed and watch the silhouettes gather, their vagabond army Creeping over everything with their tired and dirty little hands The books I’ve read to death, the literary suicide, gathering in a spot of light Like flocking birds fleeing for the winter, their matted feathers and scabbed legs They can’t fly anywhere, trapped here, my favourite victims, dead within the covers, Like broken pigeons trapped within damning cages. I close the door and leave The untouched car crash