DeWitt Clinton Verse-Virtual 2018 July

July 2018

NOTE: This little piece is about our first non-rental, and we’ve stayed put in this old house for a very long time, and hope we can stay a bit longer. I’d send a picture along with this, but then we’d have a lot more unexpected visitors, and we have so many already on a daily basis when we get word from the outside as to what’s going on in the world. I have a new collection of poems coming out late summer/early fall from Kelsay Books, with a working title of At the End of the War.

Our House

Our house is a large containment unit for burglars, rapists, murderers, car thieves, and so many who have assault records, it’s hard to know any more where to bed them down every night, but we do march them into a tiny little box of pixels where they won’t hurt anyone or at least we hope so. We give them crackers and cheese to make it through the night.

Our house is a small chain of on-line clothing and warehouse fashion items of tops, and dresses and sweaters, and pants, and T-shirts, and jammies, and coats and gloves and scarves and boots and way too many shoes, and underwear.

Our house is an ever changing grocery aisle of foods from all nations, kept frozen in the kitchen or in the basement, or in the pantry or in the icebox, or out on the counters for easy reach. Recyclables always go in the big black bag out back.

At night, in our house, and sometimes in the late afternoons, we entertain ambassadors, emissaries, presidents, speakers of houses, chairs of committees, all representatives of all foreign governments who visit us (and complain a lot) over the waves of pixels. Breaking news always comes into our house with exciting music.

In our bedroom, we’ve hosted extraterrestrials, big bad bugs, bacteria, bomb blasts, just about everything that goes gooey if stepped on or smashed but we have spray cans to defend ourselves from big green flies if any try to break through the tinty screen. One flick of the remote and all vanish. In our house we are always looking out the windows after Scully and Mulder scare away the aliens.

In our house, we have laundry that goes down the chute , and miraculously, is washed and folded and brought back up in large baskets, gifts from the basement that never cease to amaze us.

Inside our house, we have cooling agents. We have heating agents. We have cold water agents and hot water agents, and by another miracle the blinds are closed at sundown and are open for the next sunrise, something of a miracle in our little house.

Outside our house grass grows both in the front and in the back, and flowers bloom and cherry tomatoes never cease to appear, though we wonder who might be tending to these mysterious tasks.

Stars and goddesses visit our house again and again, as we like their scripts even though we know what’s going to happen, and even if we don’t, it’s always a delight to see them in pixels. We sometimes see their oeuvre in an encore performance, but that’s when both of us are insomniacs.

Messages from afar always arrive at our house, sometimes encoded with payment for services for services sometimes we wonder about. We send all that we’ve created out for review and most of it comes back for us to review again.

In our house, we have dozens of paintings some even under glass, but our viewing hours are quite limited as we are open for viewing so seldom anymore.

Outside our house we see an Escape which takes us to all of our appointments and reservations, and the chauffeur is quite pleasant, most of the days.

In our house, when someone asks what’s for dinner, in an hour or less, dinner arrives, and we are most impressed by the cutlery, the china, and always, what’s on the china. The butler always chooses something we’ve tried before. The tv dinners are always so tasty. We are most amazed at this miracle of miracles.

In our house, we sometimes stand behind a clear curtain, and warm water from unknown sources sprays us down and up, and we are so refreshed after. We look forward to the next time for this localized rain shower.

In our house, one of us is always yelling to the other of us as our intercom has never existed, so we have to throw our voices long distances in order to have a favor completed.

In our house, we look outside and see all the seasons, and somebody always arrives to blow away the leaves, or pick up and toss the snow and ice, so we don’t fall down and break more bones.

In our house, sometimes someone is on the floor, and white coats always arrive to take a pulse, and then one of us appears in front of doctors and nurses and sometimes we stay in a house with many others like us, and when better, we always come back to our house.

We’ve decided to stay in our house, for now, unless the aliens crowd us out and start snacking on our limbs. We’ve had this problem before in other houses, and we have always learned to be calm and gracious before we disappear.

In our backyard, out back, we have planted our dead pets, and we’ve started to wonder if there’s any room left under the daylilies in case one or both of us is still in our house, and has left for good.

If there’s time, when we’re not in our house anymore, please read and see and enjoy and taste everything in the house, before you throw it all out for the wolves and ravens who will have their own say about what went on here, in this house, where we lived for two centuries, almost.

Editor's Note: If this poem(s) moves you please consider writing to the author (email address above) to tell him or her. You might say what it is about the poem that moves you. Writing to the author is the beginning of community at Verse Virtual. It is very important. -FF