Boarding House

Dark corridors, crammed bedrooms, stairs that smell

of cigarette smoke and impermanence.

Long days of waiting. Ringing of the bell

that calls us to our dinner. Shillings and pence

that fill the hand. The wallpaper. The pulse

of other people’s half-heard arguments.

The landlord’s dog. Interminable phone calls

in the lobby. Someone is falling apart,

another’s longing to be somewhere else.

You hold on to the street map of your heart

and make yourself at home. You’re here at last,

whatever “here” now means. Now you can start

your childhood again, the world a mythic past

you’ll wander into by mistake, the joys

of lost performance with a vanished cast

of now-imagined names that other boys

might whisper just to put you in a spin.

It is another language that deploys

the tottering edifice that you live in.

Strangers will come and go, are gone for good.

The bedrooms empty. Here is a new skin

for you to wear in the enchanted wood.