The Lost Manuscript

The Lost Manuscript

A book lies hidden in the stacks,

passed over by age and favor,

it’s words and pages aged like wine in

a forgotten cellar, smelling of mothballs

and coughing fits, binding of the most

exquisite knock off gold, it lies there

forgotten while the flavors of the month

continually need to be refilled.

Written by young hands, baptized

by fascism, written by a young moralist

whose father would beat him when

he would imbibe too much and mother

was known to hang around corners

in the wee hours.

Written with such ferocity in a society

where the bourgeois could make the

pauper eat their shit out a shoe, the

young writer tried to find the almighty,

where was he, how did he allow this to

happen, the writer turning the pen out-

ward, to his own people, how could we

treat each other this way and be able

to go home and kiss their wife and play

with their kids, although he still felt

an ounce of hope for the people he

related himself with.

But as the years passed, the acclaim

never came, the handshakes grew

cold, and the bed he slept in grew smaller,

the young writer approaching middle

age’s taste for violence grew like a sore

inside of his mouth and he could not

find an antiseptic to cleanse it. His words

became daggers, his characters inhuman,

(god did not exist he was sure of it), his over-

all outlook like the bottom of a shoe that had

been trumped through mud and blood.

He gave up the fight inside some cheap

hostel and hung himself by his own belt,

a fitting end to someone, he thought.

His books, for the most part, remain

untouched, unpublished, (some company

in Venice owning the rights but in no

rush to expose), except for his first,

his first grasp at a higher realm, a futile

but still valiant attempt at change, his first

book lies in the stacks, forgotten, passed over

by fad and demand, and slowly, slowly, his

words disappear like calcium from a bone.