yesterday’s books

for a while now i’ve been taking advantage
of the online used book market
which is piling up the stock from all of those
vulnerable little bookstore---
the smart ones,
seeing the writing on the wall & no doubt,
the commercials for kindles, nooks and the
pandigital novel for androids,
they have committed their store’s holdings to
bigger online reservoirs who are getting rid of
tons of literature
for next to nothing,
as the death of print media & the complete conversion to
ebooks looms on the horizon.

today i received one in the postal mail,
the snail mail,
which still holds true at present in serving a legitimate function
which we have yet to make
digital---
while opening the package to pull from it the work i had ordered,
i was submersed in a wave of
old book smell---
it was not the moldy disgusting smell that you might find at a
garage sale
when people are throwing away their junk because the ceiling had
fell through and water had gone
everywhere,
instead,
it was the smell that only a reader who has been taking part in the act
for quite some time
would know---
it is as if the wooden shelf that the book had been sitting on for
all these years
enveloped the book itself &
holding the book to my nose,
flipping the pages slowly
i felt like i was in a library all to myself &
as i have in the past,
like a kid in a candy store,
i felt as if this online rounding up of all the dying little stores
was my own way of turning my abode into that
store which liberated me through offering me so very many
abundant treats---
this smell tickled my intellect & my consciousness,
it wreaked something of sandlewood, dust and quite frankly
aged
paper,
which holds a unique & wonderful scent
all its own.

yesterday’s books never seem to disappoint &
that is not to say that i do not look forward to more years being alive
where large quantities of new literature do not make their way to me
via our most cutting edge technology
whatever that might be---
i consider it a pleasure to stroll amidst the paragraphs,
the sentences, the words,
the meanings & the overall
narratives,
wherever they might take me.