One Poem by Paul Tanner

 

why don’t you get a kindle?

 

give me pages piss-yellow with smoke

give me cigarette burns leaving holes in salient dialogue  

give me the carcass of a bug on the first line of chapter 5

give me pretentious student notes pencilled in the margins

give me a fascinating sex shop receipt as a forgotten bookmark halfway through

give me dust from forgotten rooms –

skin shards from forgotten tombs,

I’m caressing the dead –

give me dried granite snot shards poking out like green braille,  

give me a broken spine

give me torn pages

give me blood stains

papercut me – I’ll bleed on it too

for the next reader to drink

withhold missing pages – I’ll deign to fill in the blanks

 

sand from a beach I’ve never been to.

juices from a body I’ve never met

until now:

 

go anywhere – do anything – be anyone

with a book.

 

be us:

here

now

together

 

turning the page

in our next collective chapter.

Paul Tanner is barely qualified for minimum wage, and he’s allergic to cheese for god’s sake. His cat knows your sins.