I browse through all the books I could’ve read but didn’t

wondering if the squandered hours would suffice to devour

my library whole

I think of all the time I have and of all the time I had

peeling my eyes away from tantalizing covers and dancing words:

mid-pirouette, mid-conveyance

all the misspent hours come back to haunt me in my dreams

I regret not devouring a book when I should have,

not subsuming the knowledge it offered

not heeding its beckoning whispers

come, it said

I have bewitched words to charm readers with its syntactical elegance

But my eyes were lost in the bedazzling visuals and the hollow enticements

of social media

my wonderland is slipping into a realm of books,

where time is fiction; a non-existential glitch

I fall into the warm embraces the words have to offer

feather into the very-much real characters and

breathe deliberately and conscionably in

air bedecked with winsome words.