I

Tip tapping his pen on the desk before him, Joshua Y. let his eyes desultorily gaze across his room, as he sat spinning slowly in his desk chair. It was a manoeuvre he had hoped would help ideas and inspiration passively drift into his mind, like flies to a wad of spinning cotton candy. Desk, bed, bookshelf, door – desk, bed, bookshelf, door; after two more spins, the dizziness began to hurt, and he drifted to a halt, completing the circle and facing towards his desk.

‘Homework, homework,’ he said, half to himself, and half to the cruel world that brought this affliction upon him, hoping that either would magically resolve his problems without further toil.

The empty sheet of paper that lay innocently on Josh’s desk was an English assignment he had received two weeks before, but only visited some ten minutes prior to his point of utter helplessness – it was not competency that had fuelled his procrastination for so long. The assignment was one on creative writing, where he was to express himself and his inner feelings, towards anything he wanted: towards himself, his family, friends – the world; but he had to write it in verse, and although no restrictions were put onto what metre he had to use, or what poetic structure he had to employ, or even whether the poem would have to have any rhyme in it or if it could be completely freeform, it would still have to be considered poetry, and that brought Joshua great lengths of displeasure.

‘What even is poetry?’ he thought to himself, more times in the last ten minutes than ever in his life before. ‘Is it not just laziness of words? Writers unable to connect dots themselves, so they leave it off to the readers, and when the readers complete the picture, they give undue praise to the poets? It’s like being given flour and using it to make bread, then praising the one that gave the flower for an excellent loaf of bread…’ – such arguments, and many that were only slightly more reasonable, came to Joshua’s mind, and while he could produce a panoply of metaphors to describe just why he could not complete the assignment before him, he struggled to realise any use of such metaphorical connection that the assignment rewarded, and wrote nothing down on the empty piece of paper. The only change in the sheet’s surface came an hour into the endeavour, when Josh finally chose to write the day’s date in the upper right corner – he then promptly threw that sheet away, realising he could not show that he started the assignment a day before it was due, and on the paper that followed he wrote a sooner date, of the week just passed, and figured such a calibre of lie was not too difficult for his teacher to believe.

‘Homework, homework,’ he echoed. Two whole hours had passed without him writing a single word of the requested poem.

‘Isn’t poetry’s whole theme that it’s about feelings? That it comes from the heart? How can you request someone to produce something they feel strongly about? That’s not how feelings work…’ Joshua continued his contemplations.

‘No,’ he interjected his own internal dialogue. ‘I’ve lost too much time to this. I’m going to write anything, and that will be that. This is not worth the time lost. I’ll recover the marks some other way.’

He picked up the pen he had only just put down, and without any further hesitation threw it onto the page. No more thoughts followed: he just started writing.

Pen on paper
Blue ink, blue stains
Blue hands on the clock
Tick tock – tick tock
Blue bags, blue veins
I the pauper.

Where time flew
For this little blue;

Can’t undo
What this blue
Has taken from me.

Joshua jotted its words down within a minute. The clock was coming onto midnight, and all that the mess he conjured needed was a title to top it off, and he could go to sleep.

‘Keep it simple,’ Josh thought, and, scanning the poem one more time, tossed his pen back to the top of the page.

This Blue Evening

The poem was, of course, about the evening Joshua just wasted on the assignment. The ink he used was blue, and it was the first thing he saw, so he noted it; and where he should have placed more rage into having wasted the evening on such a meaningless enterprise, Joshua’s fatigue only allowed him to express disappointment and upset for the time the little streaks of ink took away from him that night.

Contented with his product, and too tired to care any further, Josh carefully slipped the sheet into a sleeve, which he placed inside his school bag, and after swiftly washing up and changing clothes, he hopped into bed and refused to think about the assignment any further. A serene sleep washed over him within seconds, and he entered into a deep slumber.

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