Stare at your bedroom wall
and bard me a story about
the creeks of white between
the sun-patches of blue paint,
the faded yellow of the door
where the damp towel was hung
day after day after day.
Tell me about the mark
of a swept paintbrush
that accidentally destroyed
distinction between wall
and radiator.
They're no longer clean,
either of them.
How are the door handle dent marks
from that hurried moment when
you rushed into your room
away from our argument?
What of those stories?
Will you need a new place
to erase the memories from your mind?
The flies and the walls cannot speak
to anyone but you now.

It's all rotten anyway.
The sweet stink of evenings
spent in an intimate supine,
with a cleaver caught upright
in the cutting board bedpost.
We were atop one another
with our faces to the ceiling,
reading passages of poems aloud
after drenching the bed sheets
in varied indentations.
Cut words and minced gazes,
we grayed as shadows
against those weathered walls.
I remember those walls,
moonlight had reflected off the frames
of littered photographs, those stories,
and created a dance floor pattern of crescents
and plank-meeting-plank askew.
Those walls will tell me stories
even if you decide not to anymore.
I'd buy them all up, I would,
as I do the meat hook-hanging
in the butcher shop.