Homebuilding

We wave off the guests at the door, company goes home, and the lock is set in place,

and you are screaming in my face.

Because now they're gone you get to unleash everything you sat on, everything somehow you were too polite to say.

It festered, in captivity, in your canines,

and with the company gone, so is my defense, and so your canines bite.

I don't think about anyone but myself, how useless I am and how lazy

You dismiss me before I can answer in any capacity.

The next morning I'm greeted with grins and inquiries about how I slept -

because of course you slept well, the argument forgotten as soon as it's over, as if the words you said were nothing but dandelion fuzz;

a sudden eruption, but dispersed in a second, to do no harm, to be forgotten.

Maybe the wind forgets the seeds it throws around, but the ground doesn't.

If you could see the flowers growing in my body, trellissed spine,

that I have to prune away each night just so I can lie,

if you could see the fruit of the things you say frivolously rotting on the branches growing into my neck

I don't think you'd ever again ask how I slept.

The garden out our shoebox window is overgrown and yellow - I can't even keep the wild stuff alive.

But I am a meticuously-manicured garden on the inside.

I knew roses like blood and bone to help them grow;

never thought to put them inside a human body until you, though.

But I can see the logic of it now; the ribcage makes for lovely planter boxes.

And it's not as if in there they'll run out of oxygen.

I might.

That's the thing. I'm not nature, by nature, it isn't meant to grow in me.

This house became your home, and then I became a smaller home inside it for all the stuff you didn't want to keep around the company.

I'm like a broom closet for all your rage; a garden to bury your dead in;

I'm some useless storage space; I just happen to have lips,

don't worry, like every door to every wicked collection we can't have the neighbours see, I won't open them.

I'm under no delisuions. There isn't room for two.

This place is home to you.

There's only one thing left for me, then, and I've been trying

Maybe if I win this contest I'll have the money, finally.

There's a house out at the edge of town, I don't know if it's for sale. I see it every Sunday on the drive.

It's a weatherboarded box, and all the garden is outside.

And even if not that one, that's the one I keep in mind.

If I can just scrape in the money, I'm going out to the edge of town,

and I'm either buying a box or putting a deposit down,

and I am making a home as far away from here as I can get.

And I'm calling my best friend.

And I'm tearing out the storage closets, and the garden sheds, and everywhere else you hid your ugly things,

I'm making every storage space open plan,

in my home, I will not be hiding things behind closed doors.

I'm using storage spaces for what they're intended for.

Maybe I'll have planter boxes again, but this time on the windowsill, or the porch,

maybe I'll plant things that don't even have a purpose; not vegetables, or herbs, or anything edible at all

Maybe something pretty, just to look at. Just to make me smile.

Maybe I'll plant dandelions.