The Bombing of the Burbage Public Library (Part 3)
III
Janitor
KIKIKICKED!
Poor V.V. Crews
back to the muddle and heaps
of the ground stacks,
pinning him tight
'twixt mold-eaten empty covers
and wads of chewed junk chewed up
'n plastered to the shelves.
All the Kings clapped their bindings
to drown out the boy's mooning
and the second shelf barked
n' yammered in protest
'til librarians silenced them
with menacing glares.
But despite all their moaning,
their groans 'n page rending,
Shakespeare's been captured,
enraptured in love
with a novella's cast off remains.
Her pages quiver,
electric in love, love, love,
on fire with love, love, love!
...
IV
So the councilmen gathered to quiet the rabble,
to find a solution to love's ugly grasp
on the sweet sonnet's heart.
...
All composed of great novels, the councilmen mumbled
their curses for all battered books and cheap zines,
published whelps they despised.
...
Wearing cracked leather faces all polished with pride,
misters Tolkien and Williams condemned all the days
V.V. Crews had been shelved.
...
So they gathered their thoughts and they laid down the law,
and although it was wretched they turned not their course:
the poor Shakespeare must die.
...
V
'Twas Poe who struck first!
With a rose and a cognac,
he flung the helpless lovestruck Sonnets from the shelf!
Words spilled!
Wilson spat from on high as she tumbled,
her pages ripping through the air.
Her screams brought a bookman,
cigarette pursed in his lips,
but when 'round the corner he came,
her voice had been hushed hushed forever,
her spine shattered on linoleum tiles!
VI
With a cry V.V. Crews
wrenched himself from the shelf,
half his cover torn off,
bleeding ink with his tears.
As the life left his lett'ring,
he kissed Shakespeare's Sonnets
and then died at her side.
In his shock, the bookman
let his cigarette fall,
a crime to the mind,
but a gift to the heart.
When the flames struck the lovers
it lit all the stacks!
Fire coursed down the aisle
and swallowed the shelves!
The bookman fled and dodged the blaze,
but the gods!
The passion fueled inferno
blackened their pages and blistered their bindings,
exploding the thoughts of the dead literati!
And as the blaze raged,
the linoleum burnt and peeled back from the floor,
and the stone foundations sizzled in the HEAT HEAT HEAT,
and the bodies of V.V. and Shakespeare
dissolved into ash,
burning into the floor
pure white letters of love.
When the fire chief
fought his way to their grave,
the floor had gone black
save for three pale white words:
AMOR VINCIT OMNIA
...
Epilogue
And thus the Burbage Public Libr'ry burnt.
Not bombed at all, but seared with flames of love.
To those who tread her hallowed halls, remember well
the lives of these lost souls, reduced to ash,
Their pages ever intertwined as one.
