Writing Sample: Book Club

Song lyrics. Whimsical, grandiloquent.
Recorded by The Last Book Club.

This is a lighthearted theme song for my band, The Last Book Club. It’s about an outlaw book club in a post-truth dystopia searching for a hidden meaning in books that will set the world right again.

We are sacrosanct,
meeting in forgotten haunts
to commune with serifed fonts.
Minds all racing, this grand pre-
apocalyptic land
now relies on us deciphering
our arcane contraband.

We are on a quest
to find some meaning in this mess
or create some if necessed.
Earnest questions analyze
each ligature askance.
It’s between the lines where we will find our chance to

turn the tide of this semanticide.
For the truth isn’t dead, it just had to hide
inside cagey quires with guiding lights slyly implied.
We will find a reading to set the world anew.
We are a book club; what else can we do?

We are only hopes,
quaint folkloric hero tropes
risking lives on horoscopes.
Nacarat and mazarine
sky motion-picturesque,
we will delve through every rumored tomblike desk, ’til

on the last page we find the palimpsest
of an ancient alchemical almagest
where the mages presaged we would read our way out of this mess.
We are a book club; what else can we do?
We are a book club. Who the hell are you?

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