The Book Of

the book of dip netting beaks, the book of
mud probing beaks, the book of kissing
as a form of knife sharpening,
the book of lovers & the book of beloveds,
the book of glass, float glass,
& the book of bodies, bodies as birds
slamming into glass, into invisible things, the idea
of invisible things, the book of religion
& the book of the dead, the half dead,
the newly dead, the almost dead, the nearly dead,
those dead as door nails, dead as a dead phrase,
& the book of the resuscitated, the reanimated,
the book of flesh sewn together, organs harvested,
blood transfused, the book of zombies
& the book of consciousness,  
the book of consciousness tucked under the rotting arm
of a zombie stumbling sunward,
lightward, humanward, the 9th ward,
the flooded ward, the ward of humans
as numbers, any number of humans
reading the book of happiness,  
the book of pills, the book of oracles & auricles
& the book of homophones & heteronyms,
sand-filled orifices, light-filled orifices,
pain-filled, toy-filled, vegetable-filled,
word-filled, or used to speak words,
the book of or, of of, of b, of beginnings
& of books that also begin, that end
or never end, the coverless book, the pageless book,
the book of waterfalls, the book of scrolls,
the scroll of the book of waterfalls & the one
reading there, falling there, surfacing
in the book of noise, spells, spellings,
one for each one, one for every image
circulating, unbound,  holding
the image of a book in hand, the image of
a face in hand, a face from the book of faces,
fleshless, odorless, a face the size of a
thumbnail,  compressed, encoded,
a series of numbers, immaterial, a face
in a river of faces, streaming, where are you
now, where is your head now, your face now