Complete with Emily Dickinson Installed

"You need an extra light over there?"
The man asks the man in the lobby.
Because the wind is blowing outside
And street lamps twitch on in the twilight,

This could be classified as a scene.
Because the man in the lobby drinks
Peat-reeking scotch from a paper cup
With his back to the flat screen TV

And the screeching, grisly news footage,
Resisting with his every last thought
The urge to empathize, to rise up
Or at least write down some worthy screed

Against human injustice and pain,
This could be classified as a scene
In a play about the cowardice
Of the middle-class tourist escape.

But because the question was for light
And was asked with lilting politeness,
And, even without rhyming, held song,
This could be classified as a poem.

There's a house not far from the hotel,
A nineteenth-century thing of brick
That stands in a field of raw spring grass
Without a candle in the windows.