The House of Hunger (Hate)

The house sits

waiting,

hungry;

-

we carry in our complications

and

(almost)

lay them across the table.

-

We dare not to communicate,

relationships consumed by hate,

never blaming ourselves,

but rather one another.

-

You spill my blood across your walls

but insist that I must clean it up.

-

While scrubbing, I find

scraps of hatred, like shredded metal,

and discard them,

nonchalant.

-

Feeling worse, again.

-

Crushed, and so the cycle is maintained.

-

There are ghosts in the pictures

that I nail into the walls,

a dark blood oozing from the spot of entry.

-

Spirits calling to be freed from their wicked cages,

wailing at night when I try to sleep.

-

Tossing and turning, my body restless

but my mind elsewhere, withered by the

sickening waters,

imagining the waves, building in frustration, edging

ever closer,

entering my lungs.

-

Time passes strangely here, years turn to seconds

and moments turn to decades,

or it doesn’t pass at all, but the grass

outside still withers and dies, the

flowers wilting and losing their colour,

turning

-

grey.

-

Was there a time before this? Was there ever harmony?

-

My knees bleed from the cleaning,

stains of dysfunction gnawing freely,

-

I don’t stop them anymore

but welcome the feeling, familiar

and therefore comforting, despite the pain.

-

I blame the house,

I blame the times,

I blame myself,

I blame every other person

I’ve ever come across,

I blame a curse,

I blame the walls,

I blame the atoms in

my blood,

I blame the frames and the pictures,

I blame those no longer present,

I blame the books and the movies and

the artificial image of genuine acceptance,

the myth of the loving family,

I blame the smokescreen of joy

for my failure to feel good,

-

I blame everything.

-

But never dare to hope or heal,

sitting safely, solipsistic,

while consumed by this deepening lagoon of anger,

falling slowly beneath its waters,

lungs filling with a thickened sludge,

the nauseous feeling approximate to embrace.

-

Becoming the next step,

never learning to love, never learning to heal,

never learning to move on,

instead, more blood is spilled.

-

My future home sits

waiting,

hungry;

-

I’ll make a family to feed it.

-

I took all your hate inside,

stored it within bottles,

the prohibition over,

all the pressure you made freed it

it spills out of my walls,

it breaks down metal doors,

an infiltrating hate

present within every pore.