The Importance of Notepaper

Damn the Greens and saving trees, mutters the interpreter
on her way to prison for another job. As usual no blank pages
at the end of her paperback for subway-reading. The suspect
yesterday had pen and notepaper, plenty of it, to write
a full confession in his cell, yet had devoted it to easy recipes
for her, who did reveal in passing that she is a rotten cook.

Chicken in ginger, pork in cream, poetry in the oven.
But she never carries her spiral notepad any more in case
a poem comes. Stress is all she carts around these days. A pile
of invoices to write at home, her mother just sent back from hospital
in a nightgown to an empty house.

Until today. Passing flashy orange sycamores along a silky autumn sea
a poem came and went, for want of paper.