sparsely furnished

For my living space all I require for furnishings are a bed and a bookcase.

escaped pen

Writing in bed: Too much scrabbling about the bedclothes searching for my pen.

winged creatures

At night all the books I haven’t read lift from their perches in the bookcases and fly up, pages flapping wildly, fly up the stairway to my bedroom, they fly about my head at night, they try to disturb my sleep with the shame of their flapping pages. Waking in the morning, often I find one, splayed open where it has fallen upon the bedcovers.

simple place

His hermitage…looked much the same as Merton left it, we were told. The back room held a narrow bed and a small stack of books, with three cassocks hanging in an alcove. The kitchen, which is only a wide place in the hall, held a sink, hot-plate, small refrigerator, and the only framed item in the place—a certificate from the Vatican conferring upon him the designation “Hermit.” His front room held the writing table, bookcase, rocking chair, and those large unadorned windows with the generous view of the woods and the cart-path meandering into the distance.

—Frederick Smock, Pax Intrantibus: A Meditation on the Poetry of Thomas Merton (Broadstone Books, 2007), p. 27

suffocating title

Your title was so apt and explanatory, it was like a pillow smothering the poem lying in its bed.