The First Book I Shoplifted

‍ ‍I confess I really can’t recall.
‍ ‍There were so many, after all.
‍ ‍At least I read them all.

When other teens were cruising
Van Nuys Blvd, I was doing my best
to empty the shelves
of the used bookshops
absconding with whole boxes
out the back door, conspiring with
Queneau, Cocteau, and Kierkegaard.

Other venues I pilfered from:
Dutton’s on Laurel Canyon for
New Directions, City Lights, and Grove Press finds
(all the Huxley, Ginsberg, and Beckett I could carry
in the low waistband of my bellbottom jeans);
The Bodhi Tree on Melrose
for Meetings with Remarkable Men
(slipped into my stirrup-strap boot);
and a rare bookshop in Glendale
where I departed with Joyce’s Ulysses
(Shakespeare and Co., Paris, 2nd ed.)
bound in periwinkle leather
which I gave as a 21st birthday gift
to my good friend and abettor
in liberating whole libraries, Louis.

Guilty as Raskolnikov,
methodical as Antoine Roquentin,
we filled the backseat of my ‘59 Volvo
with all our rowdy friends: Faulkner and Sartre,
Dylan Thomas, Durrell, Nin, and Henry Miller,
Kafka and Camus, Jung and Freud,
Knut Hamsun and Hesse’s whole confederacy
of more-or-less virtuous spiritual seekers:
Goldmund and Siddhartha,
Steppenwolf and Joseph Knecht—

none of whom, I suspect,
never nicked a book
in their bookish lives.

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