Perhaps this is less creativity, more tirade? As Wordsworth wrote, poetry is the spontaneous overflow of feeling – so here is the overflow of feelings when I step into a bookstore. I’m still tweaking the ending though.  And my semi-sincere apologies for those who do like Nicholas Sparks.

I have a love-hate relationship with that bookstore

First
I have to watch out for the anger stewing inside me –

Of course I keep my composure
Like every good book browser
Like every cool book cover tourist
Holding their cocoa cappuccino – so cute – in their hands
Checking the time on their cell phone because there is somewhere better to be.
But where?

So yes, I am angry.
Angry at the mediocrity
Simplicity
The ease of which it was  –

For Hilary Duff to publish a novel
For Britney Spears to write her memoirs
For Jewel to show off her poetry

Sometimes I want to take Joel Osteen’s book, where the cover is his full-page smile, and I want to rip his paper-face in half –
– some kind of punishment for the fluff he is fibbing

Or sue Nicholas Sparks for his emoticon-writing,
drool that drivels and imagined as moving.

And I hate that Sophie Kinsella, John Grisham,
Nora Roberts, Mary Higgins Clark can
churn out,
spit out,
write out,
cop out
one thousand books a year.

Ah.
Exaggeration, I know.

If the “book rage” subsides, which I admit, part of it has to do with the melancholic sense (that I try to ignore) of overwhelming…

jealousy:

What new authors will there be
that have published a book before me?
Eee.

How did he think this up?
How did she put this down?

Juxtaposed with:

And so many more, many more, many more
books I want to – have to – read

Piles and pages of paper
And words and wisdom, wise-cracks and wit, woes and whims…
…that I still need to read, absorb, interpret, criticize, love, pass on
The lives I could live, become part of, hate, consider

Oh.

Yet sometimes
I can ignore all this
and pick up a book off the shelf
And I read it. And love it.
And am surprised yet not surprised.
And it is good.