Waiting for the Last Gasp – Adam Overland

There is a spider upstairs in my room, waiting for me. I saw him on the floor in the corner when I turned on the light. He was looking up at me. I know this because when I grabbed the nearest book to smash him, Travels with Charley, the spider scurried away under a big gap in the baseboard. I put the book there, flush against the gap, so that he might stay and starve. Or read, if he is so inclined. So long as he does not bother me. But now he is probably bitter. Has time to think, and plot. His revenge turns the pages. Which sounds like poetry and leads me to think of a poem:

My love is a banned book

I was a book and she read me 
Not to me, but of me

And in so doing she made me 
a writer prolific, but for an audience of one

She turned the pages of my heart might sound cliche’
But until she turns your pages-and I hope she never does-you’ll never know

Feelings that had never seen form 
now pooled on my pages 
An unfamiliar language but lovely, like 
Shakespeare 
His limitless ink raining down
in shapes and contours that were ours alone to read

I know this isn’t a great poem, but I do not have a degree in poetry
And so perhaps it’s fitting that no sooner had she spilled my ink
than she banned me like the Florida Board of Education
having seen my heart turn black

Now our Shakespeare is bleeding out in one of his death scenes
a victim in his own play
No longer assigned reading

And as quickly as something new was rising inside me,
a cold wind carried my pages away

And made me a writer for an audience of none.