High Room

His love will come, eager up the stairs,
where the poet sleeps over words unsaid,
kissing him awake in the high rented room,
bringing him warmth, and a sense of doom.
With wine or gin, they will talk poetry,
while he stokes the fire with broken chairs.
Too remote from life in his private mortuary,
now loving reverses his inward looking sight,
and joyously he rides the intervening night.
Many are the poems written silently in bed.

Robert Thompson.