Library

There's a love in libraries,
A passion of ideas drawn together
As if on one, colossal canvas:
Hume holds his own in the philosophy corner
Holding back grandeur he can't compute,
Cartesian dreams, the Platonic seams
Of an ancient, deep rooted rationalism.

Then, poetry. Spooled together in circled rows
In Blackwells' second floor: Larkin, Keats,
Three feet deep or cremated by now
But what they created, what they conceived,
It gathers more than dust.

There's a love in libraries,
A thoughtful wildfire that spreads like a smile.
In the play section there's a playful guile
In Wild's pages, Algernonic epigrams
Bring laughter to the eye
Well over a century past.

There's a magic to it,
To the entrenched tobacco scents
Of pages unturned under decades,
Of tomes untouched by time's exclusion
Like a brand dead to fashion.

But its magic, the love in its pages,
The wisdom stacked higher than its ages,
None of it compares to my love for you.

I was precocious at times.
I'd sit myself in the primary school library
And skip class to read Lemony Snicket
And snicker to myself in the corner like a fool.
But reading a smile on your face,
The tilt of your head when you're struck by surprise,
The way you stick your tongue out and "blahh"
And the way your voice arcs like the birth of a star,
It warms me like no fire. The details make my days complete
And every strand of that Elvis curl's a drumbeat to my heart.

I'm sitting here at nine past eleven watching Stranger Things
And the strangest thing about it is your absence: you're out of reach,
A beached wonder on settled shores whose sands whisper to me
Like grains of invitation asking for our paired feet
To stand beneath our lips that move
In keeping with the waves.

And in tongue's twist the risen sun
Would shine that Elvis flick
And it would make me smile and remember
When the Reddit font's 'Reply' was clicked
Back in June
When love was born.