Restless

by Stephen Keeler

This kitchen table polished dull with beeswax
sad watermarks the blemishes
on ageing flesh.

This strip of dried-out leaf
pressed to a folded cross
a bookmark from a country church in March.

That envelope still unaddressed.

Those books of better poems.

Notebooks pens and scraps of paper
torn to use for instrumental lists of unromance.

Can-they-be-brass paper-clips
re-used and used again.

My glasses case from which has spilled
the pencil an habitual Excelsior HB
and the pen I should have used
to write this list of reasons.