in this city of writers
there’s not a notepad to be found.
it’s given birth to Mr Godot,
and old James Joyce,
but I’m banged up in this hotel room
with thoughts like a hundred moths
to a flame.
the walls stare down on me
mocking me with their blank canvases
socially out of reach.
Now, if I were famous and I wrote on a wall
they’d cut it out, frame it, charge people to see it.
But I’m not. Yet.
They’d probably charge me,
bill it to my room called something boring like
“room maintenance”
(even if it was a bloody good poem.)
So my tired, inspired eyes start to scan.
Tear open a teabag to write a tiny haiku
Or write stories along the streets of the tourist map
Or type a novel on one long roll of toilet paper.
But it wouldn’t be the same.
Outside, the trees tap the glass.
It’s 1-0 to them.
Tree beats human in this twisted artistic game of rock-paper-scissors.
Except there is no paper.
Just the white of the room,
white as the morning you wake up to find it’s snowed and you’re the first one out into the garden.
The shower curtain,
the lampshade
the ironing board
and who the hell needs all these towels?!
all these things I cannot write upon
as if my thoughts in ink would make them worse
not better
as if there is no place for fledgling art in this world of ours
but there is
and like some poetic superhero
it seems its now up to me to give it that place back
So, with marker held between finger and thumb
I start:
"in this city of writers," I write
"there’s not a notepad to be found."