As Safe As Houses

This house warps and melts like a 

wedding cake in fragrant summer,

each molded corner bleeding into 

the door-frames.

All the furniture is hemmhorraging

its stuffing, regretful and dolorous.

We could peel strips of the faded hardwood

away with our fingertips,

grasping furtively some sense

of decayed mystery beneath the boards,

where the earth meets the hearth.

The fireplace is still choked with coal dust,

and there's pale squares

where paintings once hung

in lost days of antiquity. 

Even the windows,

with their burden of busy insects and

swiftly-rusting screens,

are a reference point in glass.

Bourgeoning Summer

All of the doors in the house closed at once, 

a dread chorus of gallows trapdoors banging shut

in the wake of chilled wind

that trailed through the house

like ice particles stirred to lively animation.

The sky wallowed in its sullen, amber pall,

little drifts of gray leaves dancing away up the road,

to where the bridge swayed drunkenly with 

each hollow, booming gust, 

recoiling snake-like from the 

bright purple frost of descending lightning.

This is the kind of rain

that washes seasons away whole, 

shrieking into the maw of raw yesterdays,

all bent backwards into oblivion.