The House That Still Burns

...

I am told that I am a haunted house,

hollow boards groaning under ghosts,

a draft in the corridor where no one lingers.

...

They knock,

peer through cracked windows,

say no one lives there but shadows -

and leave before their own breath fogs the glass.

...

Yet in the marrow of me burns a kitchen -

bread rising, kettle spitting,

a warmth so steady it could cradle the lost.

...

But who stays to taste it?

They feel the chill of stairwells,

The echo of old doors slammed,

and confuse it for emptiness.

...

Abandonment has teeth sharper than solitude.

It is the sound of a latch unfastened

just when you've set the table for two.

It is the flame of the stove,

left to burn for no one,

simmering soups that rot in silence.

...

I rage -

That the world clings to its fiction of me,

as if I were nothing but broken shutters

and a cursed address,

as if every ghost who moans in my ribs

were not also a hymn,

a plea for someone to stay,

to touch the iron pot still warm,

to believe in the life thrumming in these rooms.

...

Fury hammers my rafters,

heartbreak rattles the windowpanes -

and still the kitchen glows,

the chair pulled out waiting,

the ghosts singing like violins in the walls:

I am not cold.

I am not empty.

But how long can a house burn

for no one

before it too becomes ash?