He spent his days now moving upward in the house of his childhood,
Each night in a different room
A kitbag packed with minor accessories:
Teas of the Fareast, a campstove, a tiny radio and an old
Smith-Corona
Where he camped he barricaded the door against no one and painted and moved furniture
He would stare at the typewriter until late
Walls of crudely tinted stains and pigmented oils
Applied with sponges and papertowels like inmate abstracts
The furniture clustered in the center of the room and left
He wrote little, often nothing, formal notes to a past ambition
Each room an absolute
A pitch of abandoned reverie
Random dialogues where no biles had yet festered,
no lunatic babbled, yet
He thought that something was finished forever but he had no interest in pursuing
What that could be or if it really mattered
He saw in dislocated memory a woman’s footprint in the dust of
Her own dead skin and he saw in his life a path
Of little more resistance.