My Addiction
by Edward Morris

It is the smell of the paper,
                   Babylonian clay, vacuum-sealed papyrus dust all that's left
                   of the fury of Pharaoh Nitocris, acid clouds from vigintillions
                   of mills, churning, turning over, trampling out this vintage,
Fluttering through your
thumbs, like
wings,

It is the slap of an eyeful of tears, involuntary, the way your
throat closes at the merest peripheral glance across lurid
color-schemes of Full-Color Covers as inside you scream,

This Is Where I Was. This Is What I Was Doing When This Was New.

This fell from my locked steamer-trunk heart, unaltered, left casually out on a shelf in a shop window, a little faded like the rest of us, but  still as bright, the feel of This Life, This Mind, poured whole and raw and real, however it came out, into every splatter of blood, every webb'd finger,  every hat or gat, Cyclopean tower, every raw green Dajah Thoris or far-flung Norton soldier-witch, every mighty Blackwood Alamagoosalum, The Shadow's Mahayana laugh  that always means someone's going to the ground floor and not taking the elevator or the stairs...

It is nine hours later than when you started reading and you still can hardly blink and you've got cottonmouth and the cigarette has burned down to the fiberglass in the ash tray some time ago and  your boss is on line two and you have no idea what the hell
just happened.

It is the undying American sideshow, funhouse mirror to ourselves.
It is knowledge you bring to school and share behind their backs.
It is a Philco radio console blaring Glenn Miller, unplugged.

It is the history you don't know.

It is

Alive, these coptic scripts
secreted in desert jars
Just ahead of the
Dark.