It's always a house.
In shelved books, in five-drinks-in five a.m talks, in cheap rhymes and lavish ones—commonplace for anywhere you can find words on, a standard metaphor to stumble upon. Infrastructure lets itself be borrowed for anatomy and soul: a soot-tainted chimney standing for smoker’s lungs, the fire burning warm at its feet for scorching anger, the crayon scribbles on nursery wallpapers like the prints of anyone an angry smoker has ever loved, shutters as eyelids and walls for bones and tablecloths for clothes and pillars as brawn.
An easy metaphor, a house as a body. A lazy one. Sluggish, yawning Metaphor, craving a nap, a break from being used up. Boring enough to make me look up from my page and at everyone else sitting around the table, writing about vessels vined in breezeblocks and headache diagnoses from front door knocking. Dreary enough to make me want to leave the room.
So I do. The door closes shut like a wind’s mistake, clicks, and it stands between me and the other side of the bone-white wall, an oaken bodyguard of drowsy writers working on.
Go on. Look around the room.
Chair. Tables. Walls. Oh, a roof leak.
No. Really look, I mean.
Lining paper yellowing in the places where hands and chair tops brushed past for years. Shiny furniture with dust collecting in the crannies out of sight. A bowl of food (dog one, full to the brim—human one, empty with a filthy rim). Rusty hinges and inherited silverware.
Marked up, unkempt on weekdays, prettied up for visitors, its value found in numbers, its keys given out for access, put up for rent or sold to the best offer, filthy, hungry, painted, remodeled, lived in, abandoned—and they won’t let me back in now, but I’m scratching on the body-guard's wooden trunk to write down about body-like house limbs.
