the bookstore, Kyle Foley

Gillian Sargeant, Cathedral, 3′ X 2′

 

the bookstore

 

i enter a bookstore. i am astonished by the scope of man’s interests. i hunger for the books’ info-wealth, for their jumbo of minervum. i want to plunder their pages, memorize their outlines, their frames and their strategies. i see one section devoted to history, salvaging from the past any lessons that enlighten the reader with insight into our present quandary. i see another section devoted to religion, a tenacious field exhibiting remarkable endurance in spite of man’s recent income of scientific manna. i see another section devoted to the arts’ magnum. these are huge books, replete with photographs attempting to reproduce michelangelo’s majestica, picasso’s portrayal of mind-knots or matisse’s undesirable enstatuement of the person. if these books communicate sophia they do so sans words, employing the visual as a messenger for truth.

in another corner i see a section devoted to satiating the feminine libido, each book the same length, all titles more or less the same. i see that the femme uses words, stories and imagination to rouse her into a furnace of nether-combustion, that images reminding her of sex’s hump and pump do not succeed in causing her dopamines to inebriate her with vesuvium. i turn to a section devoted to satisfying the masculine libido. for a few minutes i tremble, shiver, feel athenian warriors within me combating, hydras through my ravines stalking. i feel roused, irritated, frustrated and combusting with lust but realizing that there can be no safe resolution to my slither of pythons, nor any successful pacification of my wolves, i head for my favorite section: the poetry section.

here do i feel sympathy, sorrow and pleasantica, here i am reminded of the human quandary, our struggle with leviathum, our engagement with leech-crisis, here do i encounter men and women who have sought to embellish their thoughts with beautèzza, marigold and claria, here the ineluctable truth smites me that these poets have most likely suffered pyro-madness’ rage, been frustrated over humanity’s refusal to reward them with luxuria and comfort.

i could also turn to the philosophy section but there men are more concerned with explanation and analysis rather than laments, expungements, rain-despair and love-storms. there men’s elucidations are rarely clouded by the emocean’s erratica, irrationality and haphazardum. there men naively fail to notice life’s bafflemento, its tyranny of puzzle, its maze endlessum of mind-spiral. born into a universe not of our creation, infinitely larger than we can ever conceive, possessed of principals and rules that we can only dimly divine, subject to a God or gods who menace us with distance, long periods of silence and unfathomability, a violet nebula thus casts our intellect into a hodge-podge of gnats. yet when one turns the telescope inward as in poetry rather than outward as in philosophy, one cannot help but unveil more luminous facts, portray a cosmos more easily accessible, vibrant, wealthy and flaming.

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Kyle Foley

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