Confessions to a Poet

     "Rage. Rage and fear. Standard feelings growing up, for me at least."
Lounging on a stack of books doubling as a chair, a cherubic faced but rangy teen sat with pale crystal blue eyes and a shock of amber hued hair uncombed and crazily pushed back from his face, fussed with a pipe and a book of matches.
      "Arthur are you listening to me?"
      "Merde, I can't get this pipe lit!"
      "Don't smoke that in here!"
      "Merde." he said slamming down the pipe and knocking over a stack of hardbound books.
      "Watch it! Those are already sold." She rushed over and neatly stacked the first editions back into a neat tower.
      "Merde- Nito, you need to relax. Have some fun, some deranging of the senses if you will."
      "Will you just listen for once?"
Leaning forward Arthur grimaced with a mock professorial look of interest placed the unlit pipe in the corner of his mouth; as he did so he lurched forward, his throne of books giving way underneath him and burying him in a avalanche of books. "Merde!"
      "Oh my god, stop fooling around Arthur"! the grey-eyed girl eyes flashed.
     An amber head of hair broke through the pile of books as did an scarred wrist and one leg sending books sliding, toppling down over each other; pages rippling.
      "Merde! Fuck! What happened to all your furniture anyway?" the poet said from under the pile of books.
     Surveying the tiny apartment there were stacks of books fashioned into a low table with an electric hot plate used for cooking and eating on, a stack carrying a computer, various stacks made into seats like the one Arthur had destroyed, and what looked like a futon covered with a quilted comforter was really another low stack of paperback books.
     "I got rid of everything to make more room for my books, its my business after all." the grey-eyed girl glanced approvingly at her handiwork.
     "I think I will stay under here, just let me smoke my pipe."
     "Ok, if you will listen."
     "Your wish Madame Nitocris, is my command." Arthur said with a flourish of his scarred wrist from under the pile of books. The grey-eyed girl lit his pipe and Arthur happily wagged his one leg and smoked with one half of his body still trapped.
     "As I was saying;rage and anger and I should add anxiety were what my home was filled with on those days my father had something go wrong at work. He would come home and sit smoking; literally foul cigarettes. My mother was no help those days she would provoke him with questions she knew he couldn't answer. She would start on her wine well before he came home her faced pulled into a paroxysm of sullen redness."
     "When the voices grew littler, quieter; I knew trouble was brewing. I would get a tingling sensation in the pit of my belly and sit on the sofa with a book, while the voices grew quiet and the sentences shorter. Till one would say "What was that look for?" and I would try to be as invisible and quick as I could so not to get hit with shrapnel from the opening salvo as the sentences got longer and the volume of the voices increased. Like a rising and falling tide of words and volume their arguments had a violent progression. From quiet and many, to loud and short, to dead silent, to loud and long, accompanied with a bang and a scream or a slam and a screech always yelling and sometimes even crying. Threats were a passed back and forth with increasing vehemence like a continuously escalating game of catch.
     If my retreat was successful, hiding in my room in our small house I felt the walls falling in on me. Then I would take all the books off the shelves on all four walls of my room. I neatly stacked them one-by-one and build a coffin, a sarcophagus and settle in sealing it up completely -phasing out the tumult going on around me.  I wanted to die to the world I was in, die to the everyday world, and like a Pharaoh be reborn in another better world, to enter the worlds in the pages entombing me; to be a character in a book."