Argument
You’re never going to find the Necronomicon in a second-hand book store,
she said.
And yet you can’t resist.
You’ll dive right into those shelves,
dust circling around you,
and you’ll say,
Just one more hour, Dear.
You’re on a quest, and one day,
You swear you’ll find it.
Romantic fool.
I thought you were joking, at first.
But you won’t let it go,
and every time we pass
a second-hand book store,
I know the whole day’s lost.
It’s fictional. He made it up.
Lovecraft, I mean. He even joked about it.
‘Alhazred’?
It’s not even a real name
in Arabic.
They say he slipped a library card
into the stacks at Harvard:
A listing for the Book of the Dead.
How benign, how gentlemanly
a prank.
Some tight-suited intellectual’s
idea of a joke.
I guess you’d appreciate that sort of thing.
I know, deep down,
you don’t even believe yourself.
You’ll protest, of course:
What about all those deals, all those rarities,
you found along the way?
That first edition Kerouac, signed, found in
a farming town near Montreal.
Those notes from Orwell’s manuscript
bartered from a blind book-seller
in Rangoon.
Well, those are great. Well done. Good finds.
But you won’t find the Necronomicon, because
the Necronomicon is a work of fiction.
The whole thing’s silly
and quite pointless.
You’ll never find the Necronomicon in a second-hand book store,
and you should probably stop looking.
I know,
I said.
But it’s a bloody good excuse to look at books.
