Escapist Is Superlative for the Comparative Procrastinator

It’s angry out there, but peaceful out here.
I could stay here until the evening comes—
As on occasion, now and then, I’ve done.

Oh, but, says one of the ghostly voices
Wafting around in my skull, you must go
Back down the hill, back into town. You will

Accomplish nothing on this wooded slope
But whittling unreadable heaps of poems.
Your child and her pets are waiting. Go home.

Yes, but the child is with her grandparents,
And the pets themselves are out and about,
And down in the desert the world is small

And the news hangs down in cobwebs from walls,
That old “design of darkness to appall”—
I’ll go back a bit nearer to nightfall.