The Poets Place

Empty bottles, long ago enjoyed,
stand on every surface, on top of
stacked papers, one holding a yellow rose
picked today.

And books,
books everywhere, pell-mell on the floor,
on sturdy shelves bowed by weight and age.

His disorderly desk holds ashtrays
drowning in hours of contemplation
and papers layered like last year's leaves.

Here is the birthing place of poems,
some stillborn, abandoned under angry
shrouds of ink. Some merely zygotes, a twinkle
in the poet's eye, an uncertain future
in a perpetual past.