I belong to a club —
a dynamic church family
all dead amongst the
shelves of Goodwill Industries.
I see beyond the dust.
I have become that simple
dust hovering on abandoned
dog-eared pages.
I belong beneath piles and piles
of literature — struggling
to the top — occasionally
swimming to the side of the
pile for air,
wading through Leaves of Grass,
Birthday Letters, Perks,
Ryes, Slaughterhouses,
and Bell Jars.
I belong within the solitary
minds of all writers deemed
oddly addicted.
Psychology calls them
victims of the “effect”
education calls them “gifted”
artists call them “creative.”
I call them synonymous —
synonymous with my own mind.
We’re all agnostic,
all once atheists
exhuming our way out
of the misery of
nonexistence after death.
I’m no different
from the devout.
I search for life in literature.
I look to the past for knowledge.
Yet I’ve found
nothing in your Quran
in your Nostradamus quatrains
in your Sumerian tablets
in your Eightfold Path
nothing but merely more nothing.
So, I’ll stay with my kind
at the bottom of the
literature swamp searching
amongst the fiction because
there truly is no nonfiction —
there’s only nonreality.
