The room smells of coffee and cigarettes That easily forgotten scent (Call it 'the usual' at the midnight bar) An insidious fantasy in the greasy eight foot by two kitchenette A chair hardly holds its own weight But every golden morning On smoky speckled granite There rests a newspaper and its partner The ink gel pen Buried beneath calloused palms Ready to tackle the morning sudoku
My eyes don't quite greet yours As I barely grasp the cereal cupboard Hoping for the nine hundredth time You won't notice The failure in my short stature Yet you rise Like the plume of death That snarky grin on stubbled skin Imprinted by age and time And with osseous fingers Reach for that easy handle To pour me My early meal
I've considered waking up earlier Avoid the apocalyptic ritual of mornings Perhaps early enough to travel back To the womb Faultless and timeless Before mother was 19 and you were 29 Learning to love Just each other before adding Another Would I find myself? A parasite One that should be deleted Before gifted the brutality Of that first Fated breath
We moved into a different rhythm I haven't said "I love you" Since I was fourteen Not sincerely at least And my room is my sanctuary Lest I need to speak To a parent Turned stranger Envy encircles my heart For friends who speak to their founders Like I speak to dated sepia memories I'm speechless at how People know of their children's lives at all So used to enduring in silence I forgot Others speak Without the curtains of time Mutilating love
Shatter the plastic bricks of this childhood Lego house And one might recognise The imperfections of emotional abuse Hallways thirty miles long Between rooms For it is normal to traverse oceans and cities and islands For a simple conversation- Is it not? Two separate households Under one precarious rooftop Burned out galaxies Trying nuclear fusion once more To engender hydrogen from nothing Like arguments Spawned from Thin air
This old family of mine My mother My father and I We live dangerously close to the edge Like flying fish too close to the waterfall Rose-tinted glasses disguise The misery For adolescent naivety Smudged and raw eyes concealed For the rest of the world By jaded untruths
This fleeting family of mine: Here is my soul (My house key) My salvation (My bedroom) And my sanctity (The roommates agreement) For the last time before