idk — Poem & Notes

The hall smells like sharpened pencils and other people's fear.

            Row C, Seat 14.
            The paper white as accusation.
            Write about a time you felt alive.
        

            I write my name.
            I write the date.
            I look at the question.
            The question looks back.
        

            Somewhere in my chest
            a door I cannot find
            the handle of.
            idk    idk    idk
            the only word,
            circling like a fly
            that won't land anywhere useful.
        

            The clock. The shuffle of feet.
            Someone three rows back
            already writing —
            the soft violence of their pen
            across the page.
        

I look up.

✦

            The ceiling is white and wide
            and slightly water-stained
            in the left corner
            and I think: there.
        

I look down at the page. I put a line through idk idk idk — strike that, reverse it —

            And something shifts.
            Not dramatically.
            Not like a dam breaking —
            more like a window,
            found unlocked,
            swung open an inch,
        

            and the air that comes through
            smells like the first line
            of every story
            I have ever loved.
        

✦

            The page is still white.
            The question still waiting.
            Row C, Seat 14.
            Thirty-eight minutes left.
        

            But something has changed
            in the quality of the silence.
            The hall is the same hall.
            The clock is the same clock.
        

            And I pick up the pen
            the way you pick up
            something you thought you'd lost —
        

            carefully,
            like it might be real,
            and begin.
        

Author's Notes

On writing idk

This poem began in a theatre — my wife, our son Dylan, and me, watching a musical together.

Near the finale, there is a scene in Wonka's private study. Wonka leaves Charlie alone with his notebook — the one where he writes his ideas — and tells him not to touch anything. Charlie touches it anyway. He finds the blank pages at the back and fills them with his own inventions, not because anyone invited him to, but because he simply cannot stop. Wonka returns, sees what Charlie has done, and understands: this is why Charlie wins. Not obedience. The inability to stop imagining.

That scene — the blank pages, the empty room, the hand that moves anyway — is where this poem comes from.

The exam hall and Wonka's study are the same room. The composition sheet and the blank pages at the back of the notebook are the same page. The narrator doesn't escape anywhere. They look up, see the same ceiling, and read the space they're already in differently — then do what Charlie did: draw a line through what wasn't working, and begin.

Strike that, reverse it is Wonka's recurring phrase in the musical. In the poem it becomes a physical gesture on the page. Small. Exact. The moment the lock gives way.

After the Theatre

After the theatre, I knew what I wanted to make. A space for the three of us — no rules, no clock, no one watching. A family group chat, where anything the heart or mind imagines can be set down without justification. This poem came out of it. The blank pages at the back are there for anyone who needs reminding they are allowed to write in them.