procrastinating piles

A pile of unread books
devours space on chair side tables
and spawns more volumes on the floor
between Len’s chair and mine.

The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins
joins force with Benioff’s City of Thieves
to taunt time watching TV while
Blackwater’s thick bulk beckons from the bottom.

Kelly Gallagher’s Readicide warns the other tomes
of egregious instructional strategies
employed in American schools
that kill readers before they begin.

On Killing, The Psychological Cost
of Learning to Kill in War and Society
finds the warning paranoid and ironic.
It falls into deep incessant laughter
envisioning Readicide on a soapbox.

Poetic tomes bring play and ambiguity to the stacks.
The ghosts in Sharon Olds’ The Dead and the Living
track ML Smoker’s spirits in Another Attempt at Rescue.

I imagine Sherman Alexie spending his time
in these heaps teaching Roethke’s Papa
The Business of Fancydancing, when
out of nowhere Billy Collins chases a mouse
into the growing mountains of books
and knocks one open onto my lap:

The Now Habit, A Strategic Program
for Overcoming Procrastination
and Enjoying Guilt-free Play.