My student grabs his reading book off the desk
and begins folding and creasing the title page
in on itself as if to say he’s shutting down
and refusing to talk about it, when it’s expected
he follows along with the rest of his class.
I can’t tell you how many people, children and
adults alike, that have told me they hate reading,
that it’s just not their thing, and that I shouldn’t
take offense being an English guy and poet
whose spiritual bread and butter is that word stuff
nobody either wants to or has time to think about.
No problem I tell them, we all have our interests
and skill sets, but that’s so I don’t have to say to them
what I really think. Which is that, on the one hand
I do take offense, and two, while there are some
exceptions of course, without an ability to read, one
becomes aligned to roam the world unconscious
and destructive, a serial killer of common sense,
empathy, communication and human intimacy, a victim
of one’s own impulse rather than a transmuter of chaos
and adversity, that one becomes a destroyer of humanity,
a great evil. To them, reading is a terrifying waste of time, a
painful left-brain to right-brain process that invokes
memories and emotions that steal whatever comfort
they’ve managed to disassociate for themselves with
the help of a nonsensical meme-like consciousness
that favors disjunction over harmony, disparateness
over unity. Reading, many think, has become an emotionally
abusive agent, a thief that comes in the night and steals
your sleep, a reason to run toward a picture book
without words, and as quickly as you can show it silently,
page after page, to your illiterate children, and then
call it reading. I’m reminded of the fictional Necronomicon,
the magical Book of the Dead as presented in the cult
classic movie Army of Darkness, and how, made from
human skin, it threatened to eat the protagonist like
some phonebook-flapping vampire bat, when he didn’t
remember the incantation correctly but tried to come off
like he had.