The House October Built

I'm writing from your favorite place- 

can you guess where I am?

The trip here was lined with all the homes I've ever 

lived in, and as I walked past, the lights in each one came on.

The night was crisp and unquenchable, acorns grown soft

underfoot, the smell of ozone from rain in the air mingling with

the char of woodsmoke. The beauty of it disguised the truth- 

this all is a waiting room for loss, a lane lit with endless 

nostalgia like that last, peaceful dream before the final sleep. 

voices echo more here, the days winding ever shorter, coming to an

inevitable conclusion like the last time you breathed out and failed

to breathe in.

Inside this house not quite a home, 

warm bedside light shines out of the crack

beneath each door, down an endless hall. 

In the peaks of the trees, the crows ha and call

(when the boughs rock, the cradle will fall).

Here, you can count the minutes of dwindling light accumulating

in the shadow that trails longer behind you;

the day it breaks away, it leaves you 

with a feeling without a name.

We're in that limbic time where the heat hasn't kicked on yet,  

and I wander through the drafty pre-dawn mornings like 

the very last ghost in an empty machine. 

the clock, which hasn't yet sprung back, creeps

ever forward.

My hands are steady when there's no one to watch me drink, 

to tip the tablespoons of shining gold liquid

into my cup until it runneth over. 

the full moon outside? they call that a hunter's moon. 

it hunts me through the windowpanes as I hunt the vestiges of you. 

This house has many rooms and each time I leave one, the memory

dissipates, slides into the cracks of my brain, 

burns on the pavement below. 

Here is where I sleep in different quilted beds 

and dream choose-your-own-adventure dreams 

only to wake in hallways, candle burnt down to my scarred fist.

Everything is a parody of my everyday aesthetic, 

as if to say, I know you and you're a joke. 

Every time I bend to look under a door,

to follow the thin knife of light, items I didn't know 

I was carrying fall from my hands, scatter 

like the feet of mechanical creatures. 

I am not lost here but I am certainly not found. 

I feel increasingly like a dream someone else can't stop having.

The slight breeze from the last seventy-degree day ripples

the surface of my heart. Soon will be the time of dying, the time

of calls you never hoped to receive and hospital rooms, 

crumpled leaves and bare trees. This is only the deep wardrobe

leading up to it - lined with treasure, warmth and nostalgia 

like the tunnel to Narnia except Narnia is just a replay 

of that one brother's betrayal, over and over, a multi-stabbing

from a sugared blade.

31. There are 31 rooms. 

I think I'm fading, even as my reflection

inside the mirror grows brighter. 

It’s time to lift it off the wall and see what’s behind.