Sometimes
I see a child
crouched in the corner of a
bustling room
and clutching a book
with wry fingertips.
I worry for him.

A fiend for the musk of aged paper,
he does not yet understand
the addictive potency of words,
so he is always shamefully
hunched over his precious novels.

With skin empurpled from many
collisions while staring at books,
he meanders through life,
his pallid face hidden behind the text.

It looks as if one day his head
toppled off of his jaded neck
and was replaced by the offending book
itself.

But my greatest worry
is that this child will lose his head
while craned over a blank page
and spend the rest of his life fumbling
to scribble something worth reading
onto his own face.