Life Without Resentment

Nearly everyone has stored
among hardbacks and paperbacks
or dusty mental drawers
resentments, gathered incidentally
unintentionally or
by rubbing shoulders
with ingrates and other
irritating souls

Meeting her, she exudes
an excitement for what is said
while displaying an openness
a self-reliance
that disallows any acrimony
indignation or animosity

No bitterness is harbored
nor rancor secreted
among the ruins
of her disappointments

Not long-suffering
the past is forgiven and forgotten

Not apprehensive or perturbed
she treads in this moment
with the power of living in the present
no longer feeling victimized
She lives refreshed, restored
without resentment

Water skids the ephemeral valley.
Tight turns, night gowns and cigarette ash beds,
with countless souls lost in ruby red wine.

Fingers indiscernible, scaled hardbacks
lay upon the shelves in deadened beauty,
whilst creation is born in digital sound.

You are like a library, do you know that?
Going slowly crazy looking at endless spines,
enigmatic titles that I have not read everywhere,
purples, blues, reds, indigo,
I want to read you in each last word,
to suffer that impending end

Ah the smell of you in my mind,
the cloistered shadows in corners,
the silence of your vulpine smile,
Glittering crystals on book covers,
gilded writings in gold and silver for miles,
Soft covers, hardbacks

I am in a labyrinths, a maze,
Creative soft chairs are begging,
Come sit and grow,
Visions of other worlds,
Sun stars rotating,
You inspire my secret smile,

My shadows are dancing,  
Reading, reading **** it
I miss you  

─ © Arnay Rumens 2016

Trusted , clear-coated , cured cane pole
Can o' corn 'neath a Maple umbrella
Brown Trout skimmers popping the top of a runaway
river
Red , gold leaf boats sail the eddies
Painted hardbacks , soft shelled sinkers
Lolly-gagging Mudcats , sunlight in her
turbulent mirror
Cold water shivers , warm flannel shirts with
wet rolled up Levi's , Peanut butter -apple jelly
sandwiches with a peach Nehi
Cattle trails homeward
Honeysuckle boundaries , Red plum , Mimosa ,
Honey Locust companions
Brown sugar tended earth , June corn , young hideaways
Purple wire-grass terraces , wild Dove lining
barbed wire fencing with late hour songbirds escorts* ..

Lawrence Hall
[email protected]  
https://hellopoetry.com/lawrence-hall/
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

                               Rod McKuen at a Garage Sale

We don’t know who Baby ****** and Tommie were
They sent each other notes and underlines
And colored slips of paper from page to page
In Someone’s Shadow (“Hardbacks 25 Cents”)

The exuberance of adolescent arcs
Reminds us of our long-ago callow youth
When we thought we had discovered something
In secretly sharing free verse in home room

And we had – indulging in forbidden lines
Is still good therapy for being sixteen

They'll say, "Women are beautiful, like books." They'll thumb through, gently turning the pages, smelling the worn pulp, being careful not to hurt the old and exhausted spine. They'll say, "Beautiful.. aren't they just beautiful?" before placing the unread books back on their neatly lined shelves. Kant and Lawrence and Morrison will line either side of the fireplace for the next twelve years, and the homeowner will recline and sigh and think about how elegant their space looks lined with hardbacks and plays. And all across America libraries will lose funding because books are beautiful. Because they make a home feel full. Because the pages are old and perfect, unread, untouched, unloved, unopened vaults of ideas that can only be preserved through concept, potentially brilliant and bound in untouched beauty. Women are. Beautiful books.

I can’t seem to detach
The shelves hold books
I do not need
Soft and hardbacks
Stacked chaotically
I want to keep them
I want to give them
To someone who will
Appreciate them
But I do not know who
Will take them and treasure them
As I did and do

I want to detach
From my cache of comic books
But my memories are attached
To all that muscle and flash
The stories of my past
Are sculpted heroes
Of fantastic proportions
And grand moral fortitude
I do not want to lose
The person who was
So deeply intertwined
With those graphic stories

I want to detach
From the ****** way of thinking
So I rub one out
Yes it hardens and shrinks
So that each day
I am not driven
By lust and passion
So my perspective is not blurred,
Woman are more than mere
Objects of desire
Desire speaks more of
Seeking something special
A unique kind mind
But the yearning still surges
Spews milky madness
To calm my edginess
It is in my flesh

Definitions of paperback adjectives (of a book) bound in stiff paper or flexible cardboard. Noun, a book bound in stiff paper or flexible cardboard.
I have to remind myself it was only a book - mass-market paperback, pristine condition though bought used. Synonymous adjective; paperbacked, noun soft-covered book, soft-cover, paperback book; softback Examples, The cover was what initially attracted me to this very slim paperback on the shelves. They have re-issued as a large-scale trade paperback Kurt Wilhelm's 1989 book on Strauss.
Parsons says that as a rule of thumb, writers get 50p from every paperback sold and £1 for every hardback. I'm toying with setting a requirement for third year students to read this paperback over the summer. I have to remind myself it was only a book - a mass-market paperback in pristine condition though bought used. It's available in paperback; This yellowing paperback has sat on my book shelves since my student days. Each of them had the look and feel of a good trade paperback in a plain cover.
Every finished paperback, every empty packet of ****, was normally followed by two or three kids rushing to sell me a replacement. It was a musty smelling paperback with yellowed pages and a bent cover.
On any bus or train, it is Dan Brown's paperback that mesmerizes passengers. The paperback edition of her biography is a nicely bound
and illustrated, a paperback that can be obtained at modest cost.
He was reading a dog-eared Raymond Chandler paperback instead
of the anatomy text he planned to study. I guess you could print the whole book and read it that way, but the cost of printing would hardly be less than that of the high quality paperback. When she got back, she quickly ran up
to her room to grab the ****** romance paperback she'd brought along.
The hardbound is for collectors and paperback for those who just want to read.
The recently published paperback of Jackson's memoir is kinder to Bryant than the original hardback edition. I began collecting them as second-hand paperbacks and then updated them: first as new paperbacks, then as hardbacks and finally, first editions. The book brawl started fifteen years ago when mega bookstore chains deeply discounted bestsellers, as well
as other hardbacks and paperbacks. I'm not talking about quickie paperbacks, the kind that publishers toss off in a matter of weeks in response to an event or news story that captures the popular imagination., bookshelves lining the walls, overfilled with paperbacks, hardcovers
and textbooks.