The shelves are lined with voices frozen in wood

Turned out covers scream for attention

Touch me

Open me

Bring my tongue to life with your inner voice; your inner ear

Take me into your mind

Where I will become part of you

Carried like an ember of memory

An invented life lived in dimensions that cannot be measured

Like love and hate and sorrow and elation.

There are so many speaking to me

Too many to hold onto any of them

Who has time for all these makers

Lovers, murderers, friends, teachers, thinkers, predictors, nurses, reconteurs

I resist the feeling that my own story is diminished

By this ocean of words

But I can’t stand too long

Without feeling like it’s vain and useless

To throw my own wooden voice

On this store of Babel