SCHOLARS
The Great Library of Alexandria
never revoked your card for
not returning that Bobby Darin tape in 1996,
the one that got shredded by your $19.95
Fred Meyer cassette player just as the final
"Mackie;s back in toowwwnnnnn" went swinging
to its final climax.
$1,643.50 in overdue fines?
Where do they get off with this stuff?
No, in Alexandria the Vestal Virgins of Knowledge
would bear figs and earthenware cups of
medium-priced merlot to the thirsty supplicants
at the altar of worldly wisdom,
a land where overdue fines were unheard of.
As well as tipping.
Today I'm pretending to be a Chinese poet
from the eighth century A.D.,
Tu Fu on his perennial peregrinations of exile,
as I bear my ragged backpack and my own
scrolls of supplication on the Long March from the Mission to the
Department of Social & Health Services,
trying to again convince the Confucian bureaucrats
armed with Microsoft Windows 2000 that I'm still not ready
to be a useful member of their society,
joining the other coolies in our banshee wail,
"But our check was supposed to be here yesterday!"
A clear autumn day.
As I descend the plateau, I can almost imagine
I'm coming down Stone Mountain to the Imperial City.
The effect is somewhat spoiled by the toxic smog
spewing from the smokestacks of the Tideflats.
Even squinting really hard cannot transform them
to ornate palaces shrouded in mist,
so I hurry to my refuge--
the Tacoma public library.
I decided I feel French this morning,
so I pulled a copy of Artaud, a biography of Balzac
from the shelves, along with a compilation of
Surrealist writers and painters
(those upper middle class frog bastards,
playing at disaster while their doctor and lawyer fathers
pay for their fashionable flats)
and sit at the table, knubby orange library pencil
poised in my fist over the 3 X 5 index cards
so generously provided,
tortured expression on my face,
in the vague hope that some trust fund college girl
from the University of Puget Sound
would mistake me for a Beat poet
in the midst of composition
and adopt me for the semester.
Meanwhile, my confederates from the mission have
wandered in, each focused on their own particular studies.
Some pull collections of Man Ray photographs
off the racks--no need for internet porn
when there's nude pictures of Kiki of Montparnasse
Circa 1925.
Some just pull stacks to the floor and construct
pup tent-like structures which they then crawl into,
evoking a sense of security and well-being
otherwise missing in their lives.
One guy can always be counted on to crouch in a corner,
Philip K. Dick anthology clutched in shaking hand,
and mutter loudly about a conspiracy theory involving
Hunter Biden, Taylor Swift, Vladimir Putin,
and a large buttered artichoke named Leon.
Some go to the bathroom never to come out,
bouncing back and forth off ceramic walls until
the guards escort them out a closing time.
The staff surveys all this
with thin, downturned mouths,
lips cracked from lack of saliva,
for all the moisture-inducing mechanisms
in their bodies have long since shut down
except for the production of bile,
which they have with abundance.
memories flash through embittered brains
generally along the lines of the excitement
they felt in the knowledge that they would be doing
a great service to civilization
when they proudly stood in the receiving line
to accept their Master of Library Science degrees
some 900 years ago.
I know--I used to work with them.
What is the use of all this
God damn literature, anyway?
Hell, I'm even nestled among them--
my six pages in a 500-page anthology
filled with the drivelings of a
hundred other losers who thought they were
Clever.
25 years in show business for that?
"I'm published by the same firm that does Bukowski,"
I used to say to women in bars--
Which goes a long way to explaining
my eight years of celibacy.
What a lying son of a bitch Chuck was.
And surveying the scene,
I think maybe the Visigoths
had it right when they put the entire shithouse
up in flames two thousand years ago.
After all, we'll still always have
Wikipedia.
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