Song of My Shelf

Last week, I woke to a crash. Having seen The Exorcism of Emily Rose a few weeks before, I uncontrollably checked the clock to make sure it wasn’t 3 a.m., the witching hour. I got up from the bed in a stupor and spent a few seconds puzzling out what you do if you hear a crash and have confirmed it probably wasn’t a demon. Dizzily, I recollect the notion of causality and determined that the sound waves must have come from somewhere: a prowler? That probably means I’ll have to get some weapon from our (visibly graduate student) bedroom, a nice blunt object like ... a book! Staring down at the floor, I discover that a shelf on my bookcase has decided to collapse at 5 am.

In the two hours that I lay in bed unable to get back to sleep, I was reminded of Walt Whitman’s poem, "Song of Myself." I thought, I could re-write Whitman's poem to partake of the cosmopolitan spirit of my bookshelf. It would be a bold celebration of miscegenation, daringly interweaving within the rich tapestry that was my bookshelf such diverse voices as twentieth century British writers E-O and twentieth century American writers E-O. The shelf was not simply a symbol of book diversity but crap diversity, offering a safe haven for broken pencils, cassette tapes that I should have thrown away, index cards, and lint. I could "feed on the spectres in books" and plunder Whitman's words for my own ends!

The next day, I tried reading his poem again and gave up. Here’s what I came up with in five minutes.

"Song of My Shelf" (with apologies to Walt Whitman)

I celebrate my shelf and sing my shelf
And every book belongs to me and not to you.
The shelves are crowded with perfect books
(my shelf is large; it contains multitudes)
I will go to the bath with a book and become undisguised, naked.
The End.

-Leopoldtulip