On a crowded shelf
sugar coated dust finds a home.
Slightly bowing wood,
Somewhere squeezed between tradition and new age,
I was a story.

Dog-eared memories, stained pages, and frayed chapters of ignorance
Leather bound tight, its skin close to tear.

A shelf life doesn't seem so long when reading back,
Mistakes seen only after the ink is set.
But still, I rendered myself of those old layers:
A calloused mind
Hardened skull
Pious chapel
Red barron flyer
Altered chemicals...
Until only humbled hands remain...
what I first started with.

Forgiveness
Ink new and abundant
to soak the nakedness
A story I wanted...
I needed...
Not quilled by strange hands
their notes in the margins

Some chapters still bleed through,
Erasers can not remove dried soaked stains
Yet we learn to hold it gentler
A rewritten form.