The Eraser

I began to erase the words from books because
I could not stand the lines falling flat and dead upon the page.

Gradually, I began to see the remaining words coalesce
into thoughts I had never before considered.

They began to speak freely as though they were unbound
from the constraints of which they had been born.

Pages upon pages I filled with black sharpie or the
imprecise brush stroke of whiteout.

I began to draw, colour, cut and paste images
into these books. I began to reshape them

into representations of my thought process.
Beautiful. Scattered. Old. Revelatory. Blasphemous.

In this way, I found my joy. It had merely been hidden
all along, in those dusty old books hidden in forgotten rooms.