The last wishes of a book

This poem was written for Jackie Karuti's exhibition at the Goethe Institut. The Exhibition is titled 'Where books go to die', and is a follow up of the art performance in 2013 titled, 'In the case of books'.

Last wishes

When I die, please don’t preserve me spotless.

Refrain from sending me into a corner,

to remain unsullied and untouched.

When I am done, don’t put me in a box in the attic

for a grandchild to discover decades later

and mull over what memories and scandals

I have overheard; what whispered secrets I have sealed.

I have never doubted that you love me.

Curiosity overcame you the day you first heard my name,

and morphed into something like a passion.

You sent a friend across the sea to find me and bring me home.

You finger my spine and feel the current as pages turn,

smile and remember the places we went,

and then put me back in my place.

It is not you. It is me. I want more.

I want you to cast me into a web of hungry hands:

send me onto the street to inhale the dust and sweat of workers;

into a hospice to absorb the thoughts of the dying;

send me into a public library for a jobless man to find;

put me into the hands of a homeless mother to keep warm;

let me die a second, third, fourth death,

in the hands of others.

Anything but that shelf where no one comes,

or, worse, where they might come, Oh and Ah,

and walk away without feeling

as if I were a shark in an aquarium;

as if I were a sacred island where only priests go.

This is a plea against cages of wood and glass and metal.

Set me free to be held against a fifth, a sixth, a seventh bosom;

to hear the rustle of grass and leaves in a park as I gaze

into famished eyes; to become damp with the moist breath

of a reader who falls asleep with me on her face

and in her dreams; to be felt and stained and absorbed

over and over and over and over till I crumble into dust.