NAPOWRIMO #16

Read Write Poem NaPoWriMo Prompt #16 - What's That Smell?

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BELIEVER

...relish the smell of printer's ink each month as The Believer arrives in the mail. I remove it from the plastic pouch, resurrecting it from the confines of this protective shroud, releasing the wonderful aromas of mechanical reproduction and the work of young men, printing press machine operators, whose arms are slathered in black and magenta and cyan and yellow, fingers as bruised as the pages.

Printer's ink is the martyr's blood of our age.

Printer's ink is the the sea I choose to sail, a vast surface of information and denotation, a film that floats upon fathomless depths of imagination and connotation.

Printer's ink is the dark wine of my communion.

I remember Harbor Books and its stock of pulp paperbacks and Dungeon & Dragons modules. It too smelled richly of printer's ink. It was here that I placed my first special order for a book: New Tale of the Cthulhu Mythos, short stories written and loved and lived by artists indebted to and influenced by H.P. Lovecraft. I mowed lawn upon lawn, reveling in the scent of freshly cut grass, a scent I would soon trade for the smell of printer's ink, as well as sacrificing the hard-earned dollars of my twelve-year-old self, currency that was itself a product of printing and the press. This was my immersion into an adult life of literature and love, a beginning of beginnings, a start of a time to relish the smell of printer's ink each month as The Believer...