So Many Books, So Little Time

For independent booksellers & librarians, especially Nichelle Hayes

By Haki Madhubuti 

Frequently during my mornings of pain & reflection

when I can’t write

or articulate my thoughts

or locate the mindmusic needed

to complete the poems & essays

that are weeks plus days overdue

forcing me to stop, I cease

answering my phone, eating right, running my miles,

reading my mail, and making love.

(Also, this is when my children do not seek me out

because I do not seek them out.)

I escape north, to the nearest library or used bookstore.

They are my retreats, my quiet energy-givers, my intellectual refuge.

For me it is not bluewater beaches, theme parks,

or silent chapels hidden among forest greens.

Not multi-stored American malls, corporate book

supermarkets, mountain trails, or Caribbean hideaways.

My sanctuaries are liberated lighthouses of shelved books,

featuring forgotten poets, unread anthropologists of tenure-

seeking assistant professors, self-published geniuses, remaindered

first novelists, highlighting speed-written bestsellers,

wise historians & theologians, nobel, pulitzer prize, and american book

award winners, poets & fiction writers, overcertain political commentators,

small press wunderkinds & learned academics.

All are vitamins for my slow brain & sidetracked spirit in this

winter of creating.

I do not believe in smiling politicians, AMA doctors,

zebra-faced bankers, red-jacketed real estate or automobile

salespeople, or singing preachers.

I believe in books.

It can be conveniently argued that knowledge,

not that which is condensed or computer packaged, but

pages of hard-fought words, dancing language

meticulously & contemplatively written by the likes of me & others,

shelved imperfectly at the level of open hearts & minds,

is preventive medicine strengthening me for the return to my

clear pages of incomplete ideas to be reworked, revised &

written as new worlds and words in all of their subjective

configurations to eventually be processed into books that

will hopefully be placed on the shelves of libraries, bookstores, homes,

& other sanctuaries of learning to be found & browsed over by receptive

booklovers, readers & writers looking for a retreat,

looking for departure & yes spaces,

looking for open heart surgery without the knife.