Rooms

Here this room, like an unwanted gift,

Here this here, here a finding, here a musty breathing,

In another’s architecture, another mind’s eye.

Don’t tell Gran that her hand knitted jumper is too small,

Hangs threadbare round your throat,

And she’s built me such stern walls for my home.

Still, the furniture’s mine and mine and mine,

Furniture’s mine and life’s still only half given.

In the café with a fashionable drink, dreaming of salt water

And my father’s house.

Here this pulse, here they piled up rooms on the seabed,

Here they made me an island home,

Tumbledown chambers so crudely scattered

Where I climb like a child over rocks by the waves.

And here the room where I keep all the dead,

And here all the things I robbed from their bodies,

And here is the light of world on a shelf,

And here are the leaves of all of my autumns,

Here where I stood in the light by the window,

Waving my arms at the girl next door,

Spelling in semaphore “hello” and “I love you”,

All words housed in language and only our furniture,

Tied to the paper and chained to the air.

And I wandered back down through this house I was given,

These rooms piled up in the sea.