Book Arts

I entered a book tall as a clock tower. Its pages all had timers set to self-construct: bird, leaf, crescent, an orogeny of stairs. The seasons were orderly as line dancers.

You can make a book from anything that folds. Waves & breakers, for example, with the ocean for a text: the reader bobs like a boat with a shark’s-fin sail.

Books can be small as wallets bulging with bills, those go-betweens everyone thumbs through but nobody reads. (This, by the way, is why money always smells of sadness.)

Books can be rooms completely taken over by feral wallpaper, patterns unavailable in any store. Some books can’t be opened without changing all their contents.

That’s how it is with dreams, too: they change in the telling. Night falls, & the words merge with the black paper. You need the moon’s red monocle to make out the stitching.