I had rooms to let and I chose Melancholy
A dour roommate, whose tidiness I adored.
I have had other tenants; Despair was tawdry,
Rapture equally so. Contentedness was most
un-self aware (really now, blink, blink, stare.)
And so it now goes, me and Mel,
we speak grey truths, get on like D minor.
We are each other’s best pets,
dangling like strays in the overhangs,
dragging our nights in potato sack dresses,
sharing wrench hands, eyeing hooks for our souls.
Our mouths are tidy, our hallways void,
the moody rooms rarely cut their curtains
though we salve them with shuffling feet,
sleep draped in basins. Our course is dotted
with perhapses, we hear the monotones in any fire.
By day we stockpile wood, hauling meaty cords
in by the torso, averting those lidless eyes.
Better to feed on this, we always say,
that we might otherwise need in the night,
in a heathen’s way, something oil blooded
and stomping in the basement.
It’s what’s under our house that makes home.
___________________
On feeling awkward about surviving the fire
The young looked smug in their beds that night.
Who needs smug grass? Its new shoots
barely blanched, its new feelings,
its dewy new new.
We were once Sunday-new rooms.
Now we are dimpled at our bindings,
we are kicks in the pebbles,
we have stepped in villages of marbles.
The barn door is ever pried,
it’s hinge beetles are mounting for water.
Just the same, the pool never changes
it’s sliding glass, even when the people below press
their palms white to breath down there,
show us the roots of their eyes.
From portals we observe
them rolling through foxholes, digging like they are molars;
as though the bruised soil will not hold.
They are coming up now in tantrums of flowers.
_____________________
Wendy Neale is a poet and writer from California. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Dossier Journal 8 and 9, Nano Fiction and at The Huffington Post, Arts. She lives and works in New York where she manages a collective of street artists.