Gripping

Sometimes a good book stays inside you—
and sometimes you stay trapped 
inside its tight pages.
Sometimes a book locks you up in its love
and doesn’t want to let you leave.

You try to claw your way past
the possessive protagonist,
but the conclusion has closed,
and there’s no reading yourself free,
no more reality—

only a conflict that keeps rising
with the cruel clutch of floodwaters
and a plot that twists itself 
in poetic knots around your wrists.

The series never ends;
the characters refuse
even just once to stay down dead.
All that is left of you
when the author comes looking
for another angle she can weave
into side-novel number thirty-three

is the sidenote “Labyrinthine”
scrawled in blue gel pen
along one margin.