The Old House

National Poetry Month is over but the poems keep flowin'

The old house

 

We lived in an old house

And I remember

Turning in the rooms 

Where the corners came too soon 

Old house, old stories 

Shaped us for new nightmares

I became my darkest self there

In the peach room

I sometimes kept 

Both phones to myself

Afraid of who would listen in

To the riveting discourse

Of innocent teen love

Ended when church came second

I was disbelieved out of 

Myself there and I learned 

How to build a basement for lies

First floors for first impressions 

And second floors for 

children of second thought

So long as I was young 

I would never tell the truth

I hated it there

For what those corners did to us

The space we could not share 

The beings we could not become 

And the weight of the truth 

That the house needed repair 

And we were all too broken to fix it