You asked me what I was doing now
What something I was using to fill the hours
“Just… writing,” I said, looking down and away
You are unsurprised

“The writer on herself”
It’s my latest mot du jour
Of course you’d say that all of it’s about me, that I’m self-involved
and anyway ethnocentricity in writing is unavoidable

You ask me don’t I ever get sick of it?
The unslept nights, the hungry stomach
The constant sideways battle to edge words between lines
or into the small hours

I smile sadly and step back
And you nod and sigh
And it finishes, as it always did
with you never hearing the wrong answer.