Komura Library

Komura Library

My life is in your hands.

Once I believed perhaps it was me,
unknowing, half-conscious, unknown, my own. A work by
my own hands, own fingers, own print: my life
in black scrawl, like the pencil-scribble crows
of a child’s drawing.

I wondered:
when had I opened the book
I found with you? Prised from cold, crooked hands
so long ago.
The black-gold paper edges, the old library smell
of black leather binding and dust-musk wafting from the draw
which I kept locked and intended it always be so.
Curiosity drew in the unlucky cat and I
was always friends with him.

Reading.
It seemed each day was recorded,
each hour and each action of my soul.
The trolls lurked in the book, eating my life,
taking my prints, fingers, hands. I bent over it,
hunchbacked, pawing the pages, longing to know,
to know what happens next.

The book wrote itself, becoming deeper, thicker, younger.
Whilst I, its avid muse, seem reduced by the winds.
A breath of book.

And now
my life is made up of dead letters;
words unsaid, undone, unthought but written.
You can pluck me from the shelves, hold me in your hands,
caress my spine,
turn each page of my life,
where I live beyond time, speaking unspoken.




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