Half-Way House

Hello Friends,

I recently saw a photo of a house I lived in long ago that had been greatly gentrified.  I got to thinking about my own personal gentrification.  I hardly recognized the house, just as I hardly recognize the young woman I was who lived there once, but here's to resurrecting places and pieces of a self and trying to get it down.  (Couldn't quite make my 3-line- stanza format correctly on this blog, but you get the jist.)

My Half-Way House

Wasn’t the Graves Avenue place, on the other side of the tracks,

round the corner from Burt’s second-hand store where the guy gave 

discounts then undercut his own bottom line to keep you coming back.

There, on Graves, with 90 bucks after the security deposit and 1^st month's 

rent paid, I was. Landed with a thump and the slow leaky lump

of my heart big enough to stain the walls and hardwood red.

The part of me dying went to live on Graves.

It wasn’t that other house in the country, Tiny, White,

Yankee-Prim  place-holder house I rarely slept nights alone.

But between those two, on State Street, near the old fruit market

We came and went in a shingled green flop house:

The clown I slept with, the blind hippie, his

Flat-bellied, wild-haired Cuban princess and their pet

Ferret, whose name I forget, but not her scent.

The whole house smelled of musk, sex, bong water and sandalwood.

In those younger, in-between-things- days, I sought

A house of forgetting, wood-screened door to slam closed  

what had opened, Big Love, Big City Loss

I sought to cauterize my wounds

With instruments that played lullabies

in the underwater light of dreams.

Not on Graves, or in the country near Amherst ,

but the half-way house on State

was a good spot to die awhile.

Most places like this are for getting it together.

Mine was for falling apart, which I did

Until lack of breath brought me up for air.

State street for the state of me then

Part Emily Dickenson, part Diane Arbus,

The green house healed me in the end.

--BLR  for the Poplar Grove Muse