It's Still Life

A Postmortem on a Dead Poet’s Desk

This room was my poverty,
my turnpike,
crumpled papers and rough scrawl.
Piles of A4 lined paper,

and smudged scraps and fragments
wind-blown left
and right for this postmortem
into a poet’s notebooks,

into drawers,
and ink splashes on her desk,
and if ink be blood
as it is to a surgeon’s knife, then this woman

thought herself to be a writer.
And even though dead,
a part of her still sits at her desk,
her hand perpetually poor.

Artwork is created using Midjourney AI, and is identified as such in the ALT text or captioned. Imagery and poems/prose ©Misky 2007-2024.