on desks

the pages
couched in between that
lion figurehead walking around the room
and the burgeonings sitting down,
thrust roundabout in their seats
paying with attention
for their retention of what

it's true
some books are thinner
and pockets less strongly clutching,
but hey;
the pages have dates
or ink in some hieroglyphic form
and they're looking for 
the right mental detector
to find what they buried there
ago,