PostPoems Be Artistic. Be Creative. Be Inspired!

Regardless where you wander in the town---

a village really, small, out of the way---

you cannot possibly avoid a glimpse

(if not a full out stare's compulsive gaze)

of DownHome, that old mansion build upon

the local high place.  Anywhere you mght

be standing, if you just glance up you will

see it; and maybe if, like me, you look

too often you might see that strange, dim glow

that seems to seep out of the dirty panes

(dirtied by decades of accumulant,

decades much older than this century

that men count as the nineteenth of their Lord)

around the pinnacle of DownHome's tower.

No one lives there now; nothing quite alive

can thrive within those shadowed corridors

that seem to make a welcoming entrance,

only to jerk it back---refused, denied,

and only offered as a mocking ruse.

The rooms are kept closed and the sturdy doors

that shut them off are quite securely locked;

their tarnished keys are lost to living hands.

Only pale fingers, stiffened with ancient

rigor mortis, can turn them.  Nothing live

can occupy DownHome, or glide among

the broken furnishings and tattered drapes.

The silence in DownHome came from that void

beyond the cosmic edge---where even stars

do not venture, nor constellate a verse

of some obscure and minor poet's poem.

Silent, also, is the few villagers'

terror:  they do not speak of it when they

partake of morning coffee, toast, and jam;

or in the evening imbibe their cheap booze

and stale pretzels smeared with rancid chip dip.

Nor will their sons and daughters talk of it

while they study the homework that they hate,

curled in their chairs and clutching shoeless feet,

bare and grass-stained, or sheathed in pastel socks

(the soles of which become, so quickly, grimed).

And when most of the youngsters graduate,

 or reach the age of their legal consent,

they take their leave, depart, and flee away.

And they do not return, not even for

the briefest visits---say, an hour for lunch;

not even that.  Most of them just are not

seen or heard from again, nor do they write---

either postcards or more elaborate

letters.  None of the parents who remain

learn that their children's bodies---skeletons---

lay in the undiscovered crevices

between or underneath imposing stones.

And I, who place them there and who, alone,

remember all of them and where they are,

still stand here like a vengeful, wrathful wraith

waiting for that anticipated time

that these victims that I have offered to

DownHome will have been deemed acceptible,

so that I am beckoned beneath that roof,

admitted to ascend those winding stairs . . .

Starward