Chapbook #4: Living Libraries

 

LIVING LIBRARIES

Author’s Note: 

Living Libraries was intended to be my fourth stand alone chapbook, but I favored a whole collection of Isolationist, Lunarsongs, The Death Throe Collective, and Living Libaries for 2026. More on that TBD! So here's the 4th portion, with more to come for the collection.

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Or just see me in the street and throw money at me. That works too.

But anyway, this is free to read. Enjoy Living Libraries.

“The Living Library” 

You’ve read just about every book in this library. Fingers guide through countless pages. Eyes gliding through every word. It must kill you to know that there’ll never be enough time to go through them all; that it was all a waste of time. 

It wasn’t. Not even for a moment. 

You’ve found yourself in these books. You’ve lived a thousand lives in a thousand tales. With it, you found yourself in the process; a collection of stories in your own right. With the loss of you will be the loss of a library. Every word vital, cover to cover.

“The Sacred Seed” 

A lone turtle stands on guard in a dirt bed. “I’ll stand here as long as I am able,” she thinks to herself with faith trembling. Behind her is the last of a sacred seed. Most of the planet wilted away when the Great Cataclysm brought extinction to nearly everything. 

But not all. 

A dying squirrel gave it to her. He was running until he could find a proper burial ground for the seed and himself, but grew too sick to go any further. “Please… Just one more day until my work is done…” As he began to lose hope, there staggered the turtle when she heard heavy breathing.   

He pleaded to take the seed, to plant it in a field not far from here. It was the last hope for a dying Earth. Neither understood how there could be soil unscathed by the Great Cataclysm, but he swore it was true. She wasn’t convinced, but she could drink as she pleased. Any inkling of something good to come of this she took. So she answered his call. 

She would’ve left when she planted it, but saw the pond was in fact fresh, crystal blue. “Just for a while,” she thought.

Hope and doubt swayed her everyday, lasting the summer. Mostly doubt. Then one day as she got back from a particularly blistering afternoon from a drink, she found hope in the seedling sprouting from the homely dirt. She smiles as she thinks of the new life this will bring. 

“Death Humbles”

Life humbles me 

For it shows that I'm but a small piece to a bigger picture. 

Death humbles me 

For it'll grab me soon enough before the picture is ever clearer

Today humbles me

For I don't know just what the picture has painted for me

“Where Can I Find Silence?”

Where Can I Find Silence? 

Where does the Quiet reside?

You may find it in  between  spaces 

Of those crowded

   

In the moment of pondering,

Until there’s a connection of thoughts

In the anticipation 

Of the words to fall next in line. 

See it chasing past the outburst,

Shooing it away as it claims it’s vacancy 

In the reading of funeral rites

Of a conversation long dead.

You may find Silence

When you lose sight of everything else.

You may find Silence 

Hiding in time.

“A Great Deal of Sleep” 

An old man with an endless bag of sand 

Crept into my room every night. 

Each step would crunch under his feet

Until he’d reach the foot of my bed.

He’d whisper, “Do you wish 

For dreams to paint your sleep?” 

I must’ve said yes,

For the paintings came to life 

Each time I closed my eyes 

For the night. 

When the morning came,

There’d be tears from my eyes. 

I thought it was because 

The dreams must’ve been so sad.

That even though they weren’t real

The tears certainly were.

I’d always forget the dreams 

When I woke back up,

So I could never remember what I was sad about. 

But the sadness and mystery persisted anyway. 

Then one night the old man

Came back once again. 

He was about to blow a gust 

Of sand into my eyes once more,

But I stopped him. 

“Why are you giving me sad dreams?” 

I asked the old man. 

He let out a laugh that sounded like 

Sand grains crunching together. 

“Sad dreams? That’s not what I give you,” 

He said.

“But then why do I cry in my sleep?” 

I asked.

He leaned in like my mom and dad 

Would when they would read me 

Stories to bed. 

He sighed, “He made a deal, you and I.” 

He reached into his bag and sprinkled sand,

Outlining my bed. 

“You wished for a good night’s sleep, 

And to do that, 

You have to dream great things.

What you truly want. 

What will make you happy.

That is all I’ve done,” he assured as he blew sand 

Into the air, disappearing 

Into the shroud of night 

As I began to fall asleep. 

This time I remembered my dream. 

It was being held in the warmth 

That only my parents could bring.

As they read me a story with a happy ending.

That is it. 

All I wanted for a good dream. 

I didn’t know 

That someone could be so happy 

That they could cry. 

I thought that it must’ve been 

From something so good being out of reach,

But no. I feel it every night

And am so grateful for such wondrous dreams. 

After that night, 

I didn’t see the old man again. 

But each night, 

There’d still be tears 

Streaming down my face. 

But I’d be smiling, 

And covered in warmth

With no recollection 

Of what I dreamed about. 

"A Friend is a Friend"

A friend is a friend.

Regardless of the time passed,

Of the distance to travel fast.

A friend will remain

Here, in the heart’s deep end.

Forever more, for safekeeping. 

“Autobiography” 

I live only to continue existing. I live only in a bare minimum sense. I wake up, go about my day, I go to bed. There’s not much in the sense of taking in every feeling that should be available to expand upon. Happy moments should be as such, happy. I should be aware of an awe-inspiring world ever-turning around me, that each life walking past me is unique, incredible, and mysterious in a curious way, in a way that should motivate me to go out and explore the parts unknown to myself. Yet, I don’t.

It seems most days are becoming more and more unbearable. The faucet in which to express proper emotions and the ability to interpret emotion into empathy came pouring out is sucking from a well that has long since dried. As if nerve endings that used to simulate feelings of not happiness, but contentedness, of the strength to carry on without having to weather easily, had fried themselves to a deathly ash. 

I’ve thought about suicide quite often. More than anyone deserves to bear. I’ve flirted with the sheer power of actual consideration of going through with it. So it started with a suicide note. I had this idea that it had to be summed up in a paragraph; at the least a few sentences. For me that’s quite difficult. How do you sum up a life in just a few words? I was writing a suicide note and it turned into an autobiography. If I was given enough time, that autobiography would’ve turned into a fantasy series just to sort out all the dreams and hypotheticals floating around up there, or something like that. Think I’ll keep on writing and see where that takes me. 

“Regret is a Photograph”

Regret is a photograph that captures your actions you’re most ashamed of. One that you hope to lose its vibrance and clarity from what you did, so that you may feel free from what stares back at you. It is just a memory taking form. Not all moments, memories can, nor should, be good ones. Without mistakes, we could never truly learn to make those good moments a little more grand and to appreciate them more all the better. It should never have to stare back at you as if it has sentience all of its own. Memories are captured in a flash. They ought to be gone as such, but we remember them still. It’s best not to linger on tarnished memories all that much. Sooner or later, the photograph must be put away. 

Regret is a photograph that should be best left in a drawer of other miscellaneous junk, doomed to sit there until it is ultimately forgotten. 

“The Promise of an Oak”

The seed of a promise came as a whisper to a seed of an oak. Nestling in the palms of the floral-hopeful whispered a dream, “May you grow to be a fine giant.” The seed heard this hope and thought it would do its best; a promise to become a giant indeed. Then they dug a small hole into the earth and buried their dream with it. 

Dreams come at a cost. The cost was simply time. Time for nurture, time for growing, time to forget a promise while they lived their life, time for forgetting that the seed had a job to do, and that it was a job done in secrecy. Before they knew it, roots sprouted deep down into the dirt to bear its stance before stretching out, floral fingers reaching for the clouds. 

The floral-hopeful forgot with time before they took notice once again that a giant stood where a dream was once whispered. They stood under the giant before laying down to ease the pressure off of now old, tired feet. They had a small laugh to themselves because they had forgot something else, too. Not only did they forget of the giant growing nearby all this time, but they had forgotten that they too were growing without notice. Their roots had changed from a brown to near white. Joints in the hands and knees had grinded down and ached time to time. Wrinkles creased where all their smiles in life tended to curl up. All without noticing it themselves. 

“A giant, indeed. A fine giant.” The floral-hopeful got up from under the giant’s shadow and trembled back the way home. Perhaps to find a new dream seeing that the oak kept its promise.

“God Diverging” 

This one dot, 

Feeling Insignificant and alone, 

Divided itself into Infinity 

In a singular flash,

So that it may forget Its godhood.

Forget Its Isolation.

Forget just how lonely It was. 

Just to gather some time 

And rebuild what It had lost. 

Just to take the time to realize:

This one dot, once thought as Itself as nothing,

That in this one dot, was everything.

All life is but a collage of dots,

Threading itself, connecting us all,

Like rope that we’ll all use,

To ascend us all from the depths 

We cannot pull ourselves out alone. 

All the connections that bind us together. 

All work, toward or against, the sum of Its parts.

It realized it had failed what It set out to do,

So It carried Its remorse throughout all of time. 

Now Its taking Its time to relearn to love itself.

To forgive Its self-aggression,

To forgive the universal rot of guilt.

One dot, one life at a time,

Until God, 

Until We,

Pull ourselves back together again.

The Prettiest Flower in the Field 

Out in the backyard, the little one explores every shrub, bush, and every flower that could be the prime location for her castle. Or space station. Or underwater hideaway, I don’t recall on that specific day. 

She took three laps around the whole yard when she sat down in front of a patch of dandelions. She made it a point to smell every single one, JUST to know which one was the absolute, ‘bestest’ best one. I retreated to the porch by this time. Shade was needed after spending a good hour or so building castles in the sandpit we had. 

I couldn’t keep up 100% like I used to. 

My spirit was good, but the body was broken. Particularly when I had to couch down and all fifty-thousand bones in my knees crackled like a demolition. I could still be my little one’s number-one fan by cheering on the sidelines. In the shade. Chugging the biggest glass of water. 

I looked on when she got up from crouching down on the flower bed so suddenly. She seemed spooked by something and started swatting the air aimlessly. 

“You okay?” I asked as I put the glass down. This was going to be an event. I just knew. 

“BEES, DADDY. THEY’RE EVERYWHERE. HELP! HELP!” She exclaimed. I started hustling up to the flower bed. 

As I got there, there was just a single bee buzzing around her. Curious, but not blood-thirsty. But from her point of view? Total stinger at the ready to kill. Oh yeah, millions of bees everywhere. WITH guns and a score to settle. They were everywhere, you know. And I had to get her out of there. 

She saw me and raised her hands up. I humored her. That wasn’t the time to reason with a terrified kid. She just wanted inside away from the bee. So I scooped her up and ran for the door. As I ran, one thought came to mind as I passed the flowers, the scrubs, the bushes: 

This bond I’ve planted here blossoms beautifully. All the flowers in the field upon fields cannot measure up to it. 

I picked my own pretty flower once. It's screaming still of the bee chasing in hot pursuit. This little bee really, really wanted to sting this little girl, or just wanted the prettiest flower in the field. I closed the door in the bees face, having no victims stung so viciously. Then we had a laugh. Victory was ours that day. This'll be a great memory, I'm sure. 

I’m in my older years now. She’s not afraid of bees like she used to be. She learnt about the importance of bees have to pollination, improving the crop fields, yadda yadda. Save the bees, y’know. Heard she was investing some honey-sweet time into making her own hives as a beekeeper. “Just a little hobby,” she hammers down. I don’t need convincing. Thought she’d stick with the castle, or space station, or underwater hideaway. But having a little beekeeper around is pretty cool, too. As long as that enthusiasm, nor her sunny disposition, is never plucked from her. 

The summer doesn't last too long, but scenes like that certainly do. Beautifully does this bond I’ve planted blossom.