My Poetry Year: Entry #19

In which Your Humble Blogger imagines old age in ten syllables per line:

"The House"

I've heard that white isn't fashionable.
Blame the sun. The siding used to be brown.
And I know this here can't be considered
A private front-yard tranquility pond;
It's just a puddle, filled by mud water
From the choked gutters. And it has no koi.
A spacious bath and shower, maybe? No?
Just trying to laugh. Because the corners
Of the porch have long looked like the cracked walls
Of a quarry, and the house is quite old,
Has been for some time, and I can see you
Wondering how anyone can sleep here.
Well, come. Come inside. Let me show you how
I sleep: with my head resting on scrapbooks
and my legs propped on stacks of forty-fives.
Satisfied by the best meals I've eaten.
Falling in love with old friends. Come. Enjoy
The fire. The fire's always better when shared.
Enjoy it before the remaining years
Consume the house, and the fire is set free.

* * *

I fear that the idea of a house as a metaphor for an old, tired body gets lost, especially in the beginning of the poem; worse, I suspect that the description of the house in the beginning just isn't clear or interesting. But I still like the way the poem ends. If some crazy god or demon told me that I could only choose three batches of writing from last year's poems to keep while the rest of the notebook got tossed in flames -- well, there are two whole poems that I would save, and then I would ask to keep the last three lines (plus one word) of this poem.

And then I would snicker like a trickster, because many of these poems are typed up and saved to a hard drive.