Sifting in the Afternoon

Some people might describe this room as spare: a bedside table and an ashtray and an antique chair; a mattress and a coffee mug; an unwashed cotton blanket and a rug my mother used to own. I used to have a phone. I used to have another room, a bigger broom, a wetter sponge. I used to water my bouquet of paper clips and empty pens, of things I thought I’d want to say if given chance; but now, to live, to sit somehow, to watch a particle of thought dote on the dust and dwindle in a little grid of shadow on the sunset’s patchy rust seems like enough.