Stacks of Aloneness

Anyone who has ever wandered among the thousands of volumes in the Strand Bookstore, New York’s quintessential used book store, knows for many, the seemingly endless catacomb of literature resonates a

Stacks of Aloneness
                            by Odin Roark

He wandered here among the longings
And the forgotten,
Not many remaining properly covered,
Their dust jackets of protection
Long gone.

Worn and torn,
The many leaned fatigued in their shoulder to shoulder exile,
With an occasional entombment in plastic wrap
Sweltering in the heat of its many paged passion.

He saw there was something for every kind of aloneness,
Requiring only to be read,
Not bought and placed on another shelf,
But made companion,
A redemptive power for continuing,
often singular journey of aloneness.

A sudden draft from the entrance door
Fluttered the pages of an ancient pyramid travel guide,
The open page 86 sent miniscule sand afloat,
Including its stowaway squashed flea,
Having once bitten the privates of the book’s looting bandit,
Now reduced to but another powdery remnant of history

He gazed upon the shaft of light spotlighting the settling dust.

Such never-ending stacks of tomes, he thought.
A mix of direct and implied philosophy of time,
Some read and pondered,
Others once he knew were but color-matched bindings for
A decorator’s intellectual pandering to
A 5th Avenue looky-loo,
Someone wanting the perfect life,
A delusion her inheritance
Could ever accommodate.

And then…

There was this one opus, ‘til now he knew not of.
Here, the fortune of lovers lying side by side
Beneath the weight of print and paper,
Shared a vial of death, now empty.
A desperate love wanting only to be read,
To be understood as prohibited emotion
Reduced to a finite repose in the darkness of closure,
Like the unopened book now about to have its long awaited embrace.

From his hand he placed the worn book down for ring up.
The clerk opened the cover to reveal its eye-pencil message:
“To my love.  May you live long enough to finish this.”

Smiling to the obviously homeless man,
the clerk said, “Just a buck, including tax. Gotta love a bargain, eh?”
“Yes,” he said.  “They say the bard knew aloneness needn’t be lonely.
Think he was right?”
She shrugged.
He handed her four quarters.