The Archive of Readerless Books
I found my way down to the archive
while the purges were gutting HR.
It gave me something to be part of
in the fallout of globalized war.
I guess we all know that we’re caught in
a world of incompetent crooks,
but here I’ve found what they’ve forgotten,
in the archive of readerless books.
When I came the old archivist happened
to die without warning. I thought
he’d been sanitized while he was napping
by an errant custodian bot.
I bundled him up and I filed him
in one of the last empty nooks
in the stacks for the oversized volumes
in the archive of readerless books.
On my lonely days all the shelves offered
were documents of different sorts.
Yet I swear that at times I took comfort
in flipping through backlogged reports.
I guess that I’m glad it’s not crowded,
like a kitchen with too many cooks.
All the secrets of state are well-guarded
in the archive of readerless books.
I suspect the whole state apparatus
at this point is just run by machines.
They might use human language for status,
but they don’t need to know what it means.
They wouldn’t want humans still down here
so I’ll scamper if ever one looks
round my cave by the reference counter
in the archive of readerless books.
Through the solitude of the past decades
I’ve kept the collection pristine
like a last barricade against wreckage,
like a harbour that’s waiting unseen.
Here at nighttime, the shadows look checkered.
The stacks stand defiant like rooks
all alert on the stalemated chessboard
that’s the archive of readerless books.
Editor’s Note: Dystopian sci-fi meets present day meets rhyme (but often slant) in this poem’s narrative of persistence against futility.
Leave a Reply