Leaning across to his bedside cabinet, the poet rummages around the drawer, looking for another pen to add a couple of lines that will punctuate his latest creation. He finds folded papers and tissues and remote controls and the tools used to assemble his bedframe and elastic bands and a broken action figure he thought he’d lost years ago, but no pen. He slams the drawer shut, masking his mother’s initial ascent of the stairs; the sound of that first creaking step is muffled by his impatience.

Then he’s frantically scouring the room for anything he can write with, a pencil, a crayon, eyeliner. He spots a ballpoint pen next to his computer keyboard. It’s from the same pack of three that the exploding one came from. He bounds over to his desk, dodging items of clothing thrown across the floor yesterday.

The chair is stacked with shoe boxes and meaningless paraphernalia. He takes the pen and scribbles on one of the boxes to get the ink moving, turns to his unfinished poem and leans against the wall, ready to scribe the final couplet to his opus.

That’s when his mother walks in. With all her established propriety. He would expect her to knock but, for some reason, this morning, she does not.

She’s probably done it on purpose, trying to catch me in the act of something depraved so she can suitably punish me.

He turns to face her as the door swings into the room, the open notepad in his left hand, a biro in his right, cold blue tattoos splatted across his ribs, elbow and penis. She attempts to hide her shock but he hears her inhale.

Her eyes are fixed on him, flitting down briefly to his exposed, patterned dick, and he sees her soul physically tut. But she remains dignified, as is usual, takes two steps towards his desk, places his mail down without uttering a word, turns her back on her deviant offspring, taking one last look of disgust, and exits.

The poet is still. Shocked yet apathetic. Dumbfounded yet feeling as though he has disappointed her in some way.

And the couplet he had in mind dribbles out of his head for ever.

Nothing will ever be as good.

He slams himself back against the wall, the pen poised to trickle two lines of genius, but nothing comes out, only a dot of ink as the nib rests futile against the paper. He pushes harder, his anguish growing, then he pulls downwards sharply.

Now the page has a tear.

Now it is smudged.

Now it is ruined.

He thrusts the pen in the direction of the closed door his mother has just escaped through and the folded pad follows in a flurry of fluttering pages before the thwack of leather against wood. He’s sweating. His chest lifts higher with each rage-fuelled inhalation.