Douglass fell into an ink well,
“Well, that’s ink.” he mumbled, inked well.
A paper tornado made him trip and fall, scrunched him up into a ball,
the rustling was loud, he couldn’t call.
He couldn’t be upbeat when his beats had flown up ten feet
(the tornado had formed from his music sheets.)
The well was a rabbit hole, its roots were sprawled
like the imprint of where a tree once stood,
but then Doug needed paper and the tree had to fall.

Below was a library; a library for rabbits:
huge leather-bound compendiums; collection was a habit.
Why did they have it? What was it for? Did they pour through the books
like ink poured during rainfall in a paper storm?
The branches contorted and dust motes gathered,
“The words are distorted,” they said as the dust settled and lathered.

Was hoarding rewarding when it was called “preservation”?
Did the trees cry for Alexandria
when they saw her fate of devastation?
Ancient clerics were in hysterics
over their esoteric musings, but we’re out of the loop,
asking “who’s this?”, their jokes but a group of lost letters,
tossed away by forgetters in favour of a cold, harsh alphabet,
and I’ll bet we’ll be forgotten too.
Who would waste their time with our mundane lives?
Why should they study the ins and outs of the here and now,
when it’s there and then and already been?

A spider’s web will last longer than ours,
It captures life in its embrace, but we face annihilation,
if we erase our photos the future forgets our face.
The fragile connections we aim to protect
are relegated to catacombs of spider’s webs and neglect,
but only a few select lives are written here,
our culture can’t be distilled into Shakespeare.

Who is it who writes between the lines?
Who separates the truth from the lies?
Can we witness in print the author’s joy,
or feel the inkblot tears they cry?

He walks the same path again and again,
as the Anglo-Saxon roams the Roman ruin
engrossed in thought and deep in speculation,
lost in translation;
rabbits don’t speak his language,
to them he is one with the dust motes
and the ashen remains of humanity’s cremation.

Reflection

For my short story, I used a poetic form with irregular rhyming, similarly to how Kae Tempest uses rhyme in Brand New Ancients (Tempest, Kae (2013)), in which only some smaller sections rhyme and are sung when read aloud by Tempest, followed by more natural-sounding speech-like sections where the metre is constantly changing. I wanted to write about the futility of preserving history and the insignificance of humanity on a grander scale through satirising the overwhelmingly large number of published works that will be forever lost to time; a historical example I referenced was the burning of the Library of Alexandria.