If I Bother to Look Up

This is where I'm writing, if you are looking for me.

If I bother to look up, this is the view from my desk, where I work, over my left shoulder.

I often don’t look up, because my head is “in the game.”

I may be found checking FB now and then, or pausing to eat hummus and watch a segment of Graham Norton, featuring Samuel L. Jackson in a “I am Not Laurence Fishburne” t-shirt.

But most of the time, I’m behind the front curtain, at the table I bought in the secondhand store in North London.

Jessie curled at my feet; half a year, the front door wide open.

I am lost in work: poems newsletters news stories letters chapters all criss-crossing each other like contrails.

It’s perfectly all right, however, to ring the doorbell, to instant message me to interrupt. I do not mind.

It might take me a moment to climb out of the valley of parallel meanings or dangling research or metaphors. Just give me a sec.

But I am here.