What Is Wrong with the Book Fair

by Mark Halliday

She was behind a table at the Book Fair
representing a smooth journal that has never published me
and there was in her bearing and carriage and personal aura
despite the disintegrative fanfare of fame-hunger all around us
a quality of positivity that implied a possible anchor in the flood
while I was nothing but a gaping turtlefish borne on the slushing
tide of writers –
I felt that if I could only place my hands
firmly on her hips – firmly on her hips in a calm way – and
very calmly and gently bring my lips to her lips, very calmly
and with a philosophic tenderness, and keep matters just so
for some 45 seconds

then the enormous frittery fibrillation of the enormous hotel
would cease
or would cease to be misery
but the table heaped with journals was between us
and the eyes of everyone else were between us
and besides she didn’t even want as far as I could surmise
my literal hands on her hips she only wanted artful verbalities
whereby yearning becomes a safe smooth kind of un-hot beauty

so I flotsamed past her table knowing what is wrong with the Book Fair:
it is the overdetermined non-placement of my hands
firmly on a slim positive cool smiling graceful woman’s hips
and the concomitant extreme non-contact of our literal lips.

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Read Reader Depressed by Mark Halliday.

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