Tonight,
no juice coming my way,
no phone calls,
no messages,
no email,
no surprise visitors,
just me and the word processor,
downstairs light
at the end of a dark hallway.

Normally, by this time,
I've heard several good stories,
youth driven dissipation,
unexpected death,
artistic enterprise,
political conspiracy,
ferocious love.

Tonight nothing.
The world is mute,
no one telling me
how dandy or inadequate I am,
how I should be reading
Chaucer or Wordsworth,
nothing but wee-hour silence
and labored,
two-fingered typing.

When the muse goes
away without leave
it helps to hear
others' tales of anxiety,
ambition, remorse,
as I in turn
conversationally
disembowel myself
for a colleague's
vague amusement.

Tonight is gone.
I pull life support,
turn off the computer,
throw a log on the fire,
and go to bed.

Either I've been forgotten
or, worse,
exhausted my confessors.

Thomas Keller was born 1955 in Ft. Worth Texas. Currently he lives in California's Sierra Nevada Foothills where he began writing poetry in 1998. He is married, has two sons, occasionally hears voices and has difficulty in remembering the sequence of past events. Tom enjoys discordant jazz, cheap cigars, professional basketball, and toasting the evening sunset from the sanctity of his wraparound porch.

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