In Life There are Renters and There Are Buyers

Me, I've always been a renter.


-->RENTERS

Our roots never took. We’re month to month.

Knowing the burdens of lifting what we own,
We slip our lives into used hollows
Fill spaces as delicate as beehive cups
With our dazed necessities;
Settle in to sit out the landing stage
Of our perpetual half-time.

We know well the phases of flight:
The tape-scarred boxes fed to the moving truck,
The keys handed back like silver coins,
The small square of earth left in offering
Chaotic and spent with the seed-dreams
Of our fellow rootless, weaving their presence
Dreamily into the sallow dirt.

In wait, we watch the neighbor’s bird
Tense and exuberant in her holding cell
Scanning the streets with her oily eye
Until she, too, is lifted in passive flight.
And where once sat a dresser and bed
On the limp carpet burns the ghosts of their weight:
Eight ashen squares pressed in like footprints.

By The Good Typist

Originally published in Heart Magazine, Spring 2007 (Honorable Mention Winner)
www.nostalgiapress.com