Archaeological

I feel disoriented in rows of books.
Through the dissenting writings
on writings of dissenting authors,
whose own opinions, with one another,
contradict
I walk fast so none of them can catch me.
I am in a channel
to be shot
off into the solar system.

I find myself sitting
cross-legged on the carpet
my notebook beside me so I can pretend
it is a yellow cat.
My back presses against paper voices
I cannot see, my knees
pressing those
I can
deeper into the jaws of the shelf.
My fingers are stuck to sticky pages
of an analysis of Eliot's poems
written by a Sikh man.
Voices from dissenting sides of the globe intertwine,
puzzle pieces that no longer, in this
nationalized state
fit
Like Bengal at the end
of it's Partition
(1911)
Like India at the end
of her Raj.
(1947).

If I linger in this place too long,
voices will lick their forked tongues
along the lines of my scalp
like the skull seen on a shelf.
(If I cut it here, will it be fixed?)
They will each want a bite
of my sunken brain.

I can imagine I will
never
be found.
Lost and Forgotten like most books
that carry me at their disposal. until
I am unearthed
from the land of decaying tree trunks
sifting through comparisons
of Joyce and Beckett,
trying to orient myself upon my mountain
because I always thought
Joyce lauded Ibsen
and DeLillo saw in Beckett
a spectacle.

My body is discovered,
preserved by leather bounds like
bodies of the wealthy at Pompeii:
searching for things they do not need
in places that will set fire
to their insides.