roomies

The place where I stay has a mind of its own. I crouch there, inside the womb, listening to the slow pulse of the house. The door is open just a crack, letting the hard light scar the floorboards. My bed, a long couch, leans against a wall which is covered in scabby posters. The thick material of the couch is torn in places, letting the foam spill out onto the old blankets. The couch is green. The stains make it look like shit.

When I sleep, the foam fills my hair. I have to shake my head in the morning. I watch foam fall like snow onto the boards. It has formed a dry puddle beside the couch. Sometimes the mice come to steal little pieces. I don’t mind. We all need nests. There are nails in the wooden floorboards, pinning them down. Sometimes, when I’m crazy, I try to pull them out. I think that if the floorboards could escape, they might take me with them.

The only window I have has been painted black so that the light can’t intrude during the day. I keep it open at night so the crickets can sing to me. Once, when I was still at school, my friends called me cricket. Or bugskull. They said I looked like an insect. The crickets beneath my house have terrible voices, and their songs are always sonic wounds. I keep the fire lit during winter, and the window open, but they never accept my invitation.

If I leave this room, I have to go past the kitchen. The kitchen has no wall. The outside world creeps into the house. When it rains, the puddles flow over the back porch and into the kitchen. When the city floods, the water runs down the hall and out the front door. There are cracks in the hall floor, and the water sometimes gushes down through these cuts, forming wild oceans beneath the house. The sound of the
water hitting the ground keeps me awake during the storms.

My television squats in the darkest corner of my room. Sometimes I turn it on. It only picks up one channel, and the picture is shrinking. There are black bands like a vice which clamp down over the shows I am watching. I believe that by next year, the black bands will have smothered the pictures and I will have only a blank screen to watch. The volume does not work, so I have to read the lips of the actors. Most of the time I get it wrong. When I can’t be bothered concentrating on their mouths, I try to read their expressions, or I
just turn on the radio and pretend I am watching video clips of my favourite musicians.

I don’t have many clothes, so I save space in winter by wearing them all at once. In summer, I leave them on the boards as my second mattress and I lay there, naked and sweating, waiting for the rains to come. The summer rain always comes in January. When it is dark, I leave the house, going to the video store at the end of my street. I get out a video, usually Batman. I have got it out about twenty times now. I buy some corn chips and some coke. I walk home the long way, around the block and through the park.

The bats skip over the sky above me. I munch on the chips, dropping some as I go so that the ants can share them with me. When I get back to my room, I put Batman into the video machine. Sometimes it works. When it doesn’t, I sit looking at the cover and I tell the mice in the walls about my favourite bits. I drop them a few chips aswell. I don’t share my coke. Once I left a puddle beside the chips and it ate the shine away from the floorboards.

Tags: poetry