Student is Disturbed At Midnight

The poet works at his desk while the owls play electric guitars on the tree

Two owls were singing
On the tree,
Cool stares
Transfixing me.
I opened wide
The darkened window
With a groan
And screeched
As if in rivalry
To their grey monotone,
Waved my limbs
Like flapping wings,
Petitioning the feathered kings
To cease their song,
Lest I should wake up sleepless and,
Through irritable temper,
Do my subjects wrong.

Poem Study Notes:

Written in 1997, one of this poet's first scribbles, written in a hotel room in Spain.

This is really a poem about not wanting to be disturbed while you are working. It grew into a nature/animal poem simply by jumping from one pun to another, starting with the double-meaning on subjects, which leads to kings, which by dint of needing something 'kingly' which might in theory disturb somebody while they were working, leads to owls.

So this poem pretty much wrote it itself ... backwards.

This is one of the few poems by this poet where he resists the temptation to throw in some toilet humour or some other shock tactic.

Around this time, the poet had an idea that drawing pictures with a graphics tablet might be easier than drawing by hand and scanning in. He was wrong. This picture took hours to create by tablet ... the poet was tempted to revert to hand-drawing, but felt the need to justify the cost of the tablet to his girlfriend by making good use of it.