A. Gray

I believed that I wanted to be a poet, but deep down I just wanted to be a poem.

In 100 years we’ll all be dead. That’s kinda creepy, if you think about it, but what can you do? We are all here, now, feeling these things and saying these things, and if these pages sit on the bedside table or the bookshelf, traveling through time at the speed of time, gathering heat and light, and arrive, years later, in the hands of a reader—perhaps even you, dear reader—then hurray for us. We love you, we do. But there’s this space between us, always this space between us. We’re stuck in our skins and singing, and no one really knows how long it will take for the sound to reach you.

I read once that the ancient Egyptians had fifty words for sand & the Eskimos had a hundred words for snow. I wish I had a thousand words for love, but all that comes to mind is the way you move against me while you sleep & there are no words for that.

A book is made from a tree. It is an assemblage of flat, flexible parts (still called “leaves”) imprinted with dark pigmented squiggles. One glance at it and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, the author is speaking, clearly and silently, inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people, citizens of distant epochs, who never knew one another. Books break the shackles of time, proof that humans can work magic.