Twenty-seven volumes line the shelves,
covered in dust ripe with mold, mildewed in their neglect
redolent of the sweat of Scotsmen, Londoners, and colonials.
Once, James, Frederick, and Ronald argued that dwarves
mined out the soil, while the
dwarfs labored to bejewel
Snow White's crystalline coffin.
Twenty-seven volumes line the shelves,
awaiting undergraduate violence
perpetrated with simple-minded fingers
mining their onionskin pages,
scratching at pieces and parts, erasing histories,
flattening with timelines with over-painted or dirtied
fingernails; rhetorical blowtorches burn away
millennia of etymons, scorch the earth
beneath the feet of Saxons,
Romans, and Iberians. Oh, alas, how I sorrow for thee,
misused omnibus of transcendent words.