M: Rhombus Learns

Rhombus Learns

Alone, as clouds creep across the sky
he stands among the books
feeling their knowledge
leach into his heart.
Each sentence adds to its weight
increasing the effort required
to beat.
Rhombus closes his mind to the world
and listens with an inner ear
willing each beat to come
careless of the growing time between.
A volume of Plato fades,
his heart beats once;
an encyclopaedia disappears from the shelf
and blood moves sluggishly
from atrium to ventricle;
The pages of De Sade's Justine
explode silently into flame
and corpuscles hang suspended in plasma
waiting for the next beat to come.
The knowledge of ages
hangs heavy in the dusty air
lit only by the fire of his anger.
Eyes turn inward to see the beast devouring itself,
a worm eating its own tail,
growing as it eats
in a never-ending meal
that ties the serpentine past
to the future
with no time for the present.

The present weighs heavily
on the stranger in the library
lying atop the books
he has heaped to form his pyre.
Eyes closed, he watches the hand writing his story
more slowly than the victim reads it.
Books, still on their shelves,
loom over him eager to see his fall
drawn by the mass of his prescience
print trembling to leave the spine.
And the hole within,
where his anchor should be
to tether him to the world,
echoes the whispering words
of pages as yet unwritten.

The whispers merge into a hiss
becoming a roar of welcome
to the screams
he releases
as the volumes climb over him
pulling him down into the darkness
within the pile
where he curls, foetal-like,
and closes his mind to the noise
listening for the pulse of the books around him
bathing in their red glow,
feeling their nurture
so that his own blood,
sated on the wisdom
of long dead authors
flows once more
within the smoking pyre.

Rain begins to batter the glass-domed roof
above the flaring pyre
and rashes down over the rodent
which watches the conflagration
from above.
Rhombus withdraws from the skylight
and scuttles on needle-clawed feet
towards the rain gutter,
his matted fur sleek in the darkness.
He stops to sniff at the rotting corpse of a jackdaw,
a meal lost to the cat
who thought he ruled the roof,
and nibbles experimentally
at the blinded eyes
before climbing through the crack
in the ancient copper roof tiles
and sheltering in the gap below.
The rat listens to the rain
remembering the whispering of the books
and gnaws at his own leg,
tasting blood once more.
With an almost human sight,
the shadow in the roof space
lengthens and thins,
and the slow-worm
noses its blind way down the walls
enjoying the heat that permeates them,
the heat of angry words.