i lived there

I dream the familiar floor plan,

watch current residents

follow the muffled echo

of my former steps, shuffle

zombie-like, on the footprints

of a dance-step diagram,

up the gray halls, sullen, void

of laughter or tears of years

spent, absorbed in walls and rugs

mothballed in domestic memory.

Flies lie dead in the green

glass of the bathroom light

and one fluorescent bulb

above the kitchen sink blinks

and starts, but no-one sees,

or wants to see, the ghost town

of rooms, playing widescreen,

silent with no subtitles,

remote long lost, since I removed

and took its essence in my heart.

Tess Kincaid
August 2010

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