Poem: A View from My Desk

This is my first poem of 2025. It has been a sobering start to the year, I am busy with my day jobs and the trailing effect of them in the night. Still, I must soldier on into the new year, and establish the discipline that has been my forte for more than 4 years. So, here we go.

Poem: A View from My Desk

It is a wooden flat-top table
A Mac for the tap dance of fingers
A sturdy laptop with a larger screen
For the older, flat-fingered me
A scrapbook for capturing the snippets
An empty coffee mug awaits a refill
A desk lamp is the lighthouse for the writer
A porcelain vase makes a tardy decoration
And then, there is me — the writer-in-waiting

A bookcase has books I have hoarded
The unturned pages of most-read classics
A window to places I haven’t traveled
The ones that billionaires and budget travelers go
Both tantalizing invites — yet I have stories within me
Unformed and untold, I have to tell and I have to write
A discovery that came too late that I was born to tell stories

My fingers on the keypad, eyes on the screen
Then I stare at the bookcase and outside the window
The benign books and beautiful birds disappear
I see nothing but my characters wander in thin air
This way, that way — then the words flow through keytaps
From the emptiness of my stares through my fingers on the keypad
Finally, born on the bright screen, chapters and verses

I wander into the past and deep into the future
Into this space and universes of my fantasies
My view from my desk is the realm of my creation.
~Ashok Subramanian © 2025