little red book

There in the last days of hard copy, there at the holdovers of pulp and ink, the bound spines and boxed volumes gathered to fall into dust and margins. Sagging shelves and closeted crates holding the aggregate passings, unsorted strangers and lovers, art and ephemera and could have beens. Notebooks smudged with lipstick and coffee, the inscrutable scrawl of my hand becoming more cryptic and crabbed as the shadow of my style fills out. Diaries of daydream and delusion, the brick by brick and bird by bird leaning into the unbecoming. I am a glimmer cast by the drudge of this past, forgotten idols and dead tech romantics, words blurred in the margins. Names and numbers now come to nothing.

I kept the addresses of every phone booth I ever used, I kept the numbers of businesses I only used once. I was grown in foot notes and index cards, in the gospels of the facts and the stacks. I was raised by television and paperbacks, wits and wise guys and the same old story. The cartoonish arcana that became the cannon, the cult of the brilliant janitor and the gorgeous beast, all the testimony and the repetitions where the borders blur and the corners fill. The chorus of that Bacharach song, lit by dashboard altars and idle gauges, staring at your stairs and gates. The way some lives end and some just plod along. 

We are the silent volumes, the chapbooks of napkins and puzzles, the treasures buried deep in the stacks. Set aside in the tide of the news of the day, sunken in the scrolling and the restlessness that passes for freedom, we are the inevitable ephemeral sinking into uniqueness. The paced out cages and the counted on checks forever in the mail, these drowned accounts and brain spattered pages. Small, hot rooms with the walls closing in. There on paper, there in the ether, gone from the discernible world. Names you never say, numbers that you couldn’t reach if you tried.