Gentle Into That Good Night

As workers cleared the back corner shelves of the recently condemned public library in Chesterville, PA, one of them opened one of the books and noticed something exceptionally odd about what he found.
“The writing was crazy and scattered all over the page,” he said. “It was English, but it might as well have been written by aliens.”
The worker brought the book to his foreman, who had it analyzed by experts to determine if they had stumbled upon valuable artifacts from an ancient civilization. 
“The professors had never seen an actual example of it, but they had heard stories about a style of writing once called poetry,” the foreman said. “We had to shut down our operation for two weeks while they collected all the books.”
Poetry, a form of writing once thought to be a mere legend of ancient literature, consists of strange, indecipherable lines that are placed sporadically on the page. For example, one of the books, written by a man named William Carlos Williams, asked the question, “When eyes are humming birds, who will tie them with a lead string?” While the line appears to us as mere gibberish written by a madman, English literature professor Debra Grant believes that writers once wrote such things with a hidden meaning called a “metaphor.”

“We all know that eyes can’t turn into birds,” she said. “So I think he might have been trying to say something else, but we can’t figure out what exactly that was.”

Critics of the discovery have stated that the examination of these word mysteries is a waste of time, and that if writers want to say something, they should just say it without the complexity.

“When I write a blog, I use language and ideas that anyone can understand,” said Brent Hoffman. “These poet people disappeared because they refused to engage everyone at the most basic level.”

Hoffman cites “Tweet Tweet Tweet,” Cynthia Jones’ smash-hit bestseller, as an example of the type of short form writing that today’s audiences demand. Comprised of every Twitter post Jones made for three months, the book offers nuggets of wisdom such as “OMG! Never mix vodka with Ambien! Can you say passed out in an alley behind a nightclub? LOL!”

“It’s great for reading while on the toilet,” Hoffman said.

With so much opposition as to the value of this lost art form, a debate has arisen concerning what should be done with the discovered books. Environmentalists have suggested recycling them while some museum curators have expressed interest in hanging them on their walls.

“Even if people can’t read what’s inside the books, we could display them in glass cases to better understand the odd customs of primitive peoples,” said Frank Yonst of the Jackson Museum of Human History.

One maverick thinker has been deemed insane for recommending that perhaps we should try to read these poems, using our imagination to discover the hidden gems within.

“They called me crazy for saying that,” the unidentified source said. “But to quote from one of the books, ‘What’s madness but nobility of soul at odds with circumstance?’”

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