Library; Papercuts
The book holds every thought I’ve never had,
each spine a doorway to another mind’s terrain,
where silence isn’t empty but a comrade, glad
to let me disappear inside a stranger’s brain.
The smell is dust and lignin, old and sweet as grain,
democracy in alphabetical rows displayed—
the poor man’s university, the free domain
where knowledge asks for nothing but the time I’ve paid.
The paper’s edge is innocent until it’s not—
a blade so thin the eye can’t see its honed intent,
and then the sting, the line of red, the burning slot
between the atoms of my skin where something went
precisely wrong. No warning given, no event
to justify this pain that throbs beyond its size,
this microscopic violence that the page has sent,
this proof that beauty sharpens what it occupies.
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