From a Dirty Desk

Consider these paperclips
and rubber bands strewn here like casualties, which
they are if this desk is a battlefield, and it so often is:

the rubble of art and commerce covers it like a mustard gas shroud.
Anything under there barely stands a chance. Sometimes
it feels as though explosions are dancing

across the dark wood, spending their last pops
decimating entire nights of clarity. If someone
were to write at such a desk he might often stare heavily

out the window or into the blank wall,
a sentry on watch for something that might never come.
In a moment of boredom he might call a truce, put down his pen

to reach for a rubber band, a paperclip,
trying to get back to a better time
by launching one from the other, firing

a crude dart into the far wall and almost
losing an eye when it bounced back, just as he’d always
been told it would happen. Then he might turn back

to the front line, the blank paper (or worse,
a yet-incomplete sentence whose original thread
vanished about the time he noticed that paperclip)

and think about this war again. Is it worth it
to fight a war you both lose and win every time
you begin?

He will not know the answer.
But he will lift that pen
again.