BOOKWORM

BOOKWORM
(for MARK Z DANIELEWSKI)

a mysterious book
appears

what am I saying?
a mysterious collection
of texts appears
housed
    quite compactly
in a mysterious bookcase
(in fact the fit between
books and
    bookcase
is,
  uncertainty theorem aside,
mathematically exact)

my fall from grace
was reading these books, taking
                          from this tree

though the fruit was gorgeous
waking up
          from violently lucid dreams
and vomiting over
                    the bedspread
I figured there might be some value
in the sacred prohibitions
                    against the blasphemy
of writing
              reading

but
  who wrote these books
and who wrote the words leaking
through the brickwork
      suddenly
manifesting themselves
on the walls?

I write down my dream
                      but then read further, find,
it was
    already written
suddenly the term “intertextual” is no longer
just radical polyphony of meaning
but being stretched and pulled apart
                                  by the conflicting
gravitational pull
        of dramatically dissonant worlds

I burn
    all I have written
                          the storehouse of my life
stacked in a pyre
    having failed the inquisition

we are
        all locked in a fiction, a forever
thread-creating, fabric splicing brain

stuck
    in
    either hemisphere

doomed
  to tell our tale

                leaves    pages
things metaphoric,
                  synonymous

left
all over the place