Ballad Of The Sad Cliché (Poetry)

In a small and damp hotel room
in the seedy part of town
an unknown man sits at a table
as the orange sun goes down
and he writes about his longing
for some woman in his past
and the hunger in his belly
and the love that didn’t last

While a tap drips in a basin
a long shadow walks the wall
he is squinting to decipher
spider-thin and slanting scrawl
while he struggles to remember
what the booze makes him forget
so he drinks a bitter coffee
and lights up a cigarette

The tin ashtray’s overflowing
crumpled paper dots the floor
editing in cruellest fashion
pares his opus to the core
’til its bones show bent and brittle
and disillusion makes its claim
too many lines sound artificial —
like poor excuses — tired and lame

Then he stares out of the window
black-fisted night now closing in
while muffled voices in the hallway
spill their half-heard suffering
recorded in his dog-earred notebook
as jottings for some rainy day
his life a mediocre novel
trapped inside a sad cliché