A crowd gathers on the tarmacadamed plane
A crowd, a pack, a group, a mob,
Labels and collective nouns are unsuitable
An attempt to dress and decorate
Smooth the lines, airbrush out the imperfections.
Let's just say them.
A hundred yards away (in body,
A thousand miles away in personality
And wanting to be further, so much further
From the madding, maddening, mad crowd)
He sits, paperback in hand
Lost in his own, and someone else's, world.
His eyes fix on the thin sheets of pulped, bleached wood
Gathered together and glued one to the other.
The pristine off-white whiteness marked
By black ink stains, which his eyes chase
Across the page, hungrily eating up every last word
Every last syllable, everything he can.
In the cavernous gut of his mind, the memory
Of the black blobs on the page
Is digested, broken down, assimilated,
And somewhere in the steam-engine of his thoughts
Neurones like pistons begin to fire
Setting the machinery of his imagination in motion.
He is a dreamer, a visionary, apart
From everyone but his book, his fount and source
His world, needing nothing from the outside,
Asking nothing but to be left alone,
Alone with himself, the only place
He has ever wanted to be.
It is a forlorn plan, of course.
Outriders of the pack see the figure sitting on the wall,
Smell blood, fresh meat, prey,
And bound back with their excited message
He is one alone, single, nothing
Compared to the monolith of them.
The spell (for spell it is,
An enchantment cast by himself upon himself,
A charm that stops him from needing anyone else)
Is broken in seconds, exiled
By the sudden fall of a dark shadow
Across the open plane of a white page.
"What you reading?" comes the voice
Of a boy, older, more aggressive,
Transforming into a wolf,
Looking down with raptor's eyes
Upon the prey of the pack,
Enemy of them.
"Nothing", a stupid thing to say,
All it will do is make his tormentor more interested,
But what is he to do? Let them take it?
Hold it out for them? He knows
How this game will end, no matter what he does,
But still he holds tight to what is his.
As expected, the hand (thin fingers,
Scabs on two of the knuckles)
Shoots forward, grabbing the prize
And flipping it away, tearing
One page slightly, unaware
Of the damage being done.
"Doesn't look like nothing to me!"
The voice crows, success, summoning others
To join in the feast of torment,
They have what was his
And like the barbarians sacking a city
They do not even know what they destroy
"Give that back!" Tears are close,
He hides to hold them back. They drink tears,
Delight in misery. Sadism and schadenfreude
Spur them on to greater heights
Or depths
Of cruelty, inspiring their tortures.
The book flies through the air,
From pair of hands to pair of hands
While he stands in the middle
Knowing it is lost until (if ever)
They grow bored, ending the game
Flinging his lifeline away.
Suddenly a catch at shoulder height
Is fumbled, snatched, missed, let fall.
A tearing noise sounds as paper gives way,
A page detaches along a ragged edge
While the rest of the prize falls
And lands, pages down, in a puddle.
The pack retreats, laughing and jeering,
He was not one of them, and for his sins,
His difference, his embrace of the outside,
He paid the price. What made him happy
Has now made them happy, albeit briefly
Like the burning of a painting to warm a vandal's hands.
He pulls the soiled treasure from the mud,
Ripped and dirty, virgin-white sheets
Stained, corrupted, torn. The purity that was his
Is his no more, his communion with himself
Is impossible. They have spat in the wine.
Now all that is left is him, alone.