Clumps of Happiness
       

Whenever I find myself in a room
with cigarette burns in the coverlets
and windows as large and heartless
as Goya's black paintings—windows
that look onto pea-shaped swimming
pools around which boisterous families
gather with cries of mummy-daddy,
which later manifest into karaoke &
Bollywood tunes, I allow myself a moment
of despair before swaddling my being
in stinky sheets and thanking he whom
I don't believe in for being a poet.
For not being in the nicer hotel
with the best-sellers and Booker-prize
winners who bite into club sandwiches
from room service and run amuck
with the minibar, whose showers
don't spray directly onto the commode.
Because if it weren't for this mouse-spiced
air, this particular desire to be anywhere
but here, how else to turn the howl
into song? How else to trawl through
tundra and beach, excavating vast,
treeless stretches for clumps of happiness?

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Copyright © 2018 Tishani Doshi All rights reserved
from Girls Are Coming Out of the Woods
Copper Canyon Press
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission