Billiards with Books

The rules are,

you slide books across the tile,

and knock ’em out the doors

to score points

on classics,

but you lose if you

hit out the baby books–

why the baby books,

who knows,

‘cept the somebody who made up the rules

(and no, it wasn’t us,

since we’ve never played)

but maybe it was

to exclude

the youth

from havin’ fun

while the experts

talked

literary angles

and strategy

of the protagonists

and met

in violent resolutions

with winners and losers,

then chalked their sticks

on their way out

to scribble over history

so future generations

would never know

what they missed out on–

so of course

we don’t know

what we missed out on,

even though we guess;

maybe

these motionless forms

never even played

billiards with their books

and used them

for something totally different,

but the scars on the doors

and tiles

and walls

leave few clues

for our wordless imaginations

and too much chalk

to fill in the concrete gaps

so, yeah,

let’s pretend

they left

in a fervor

of billiards

with mysterious laws

that raise the winners

high above

this rubble

and dust

and ruin

instead of

imagining up

worse games to lose.