Moving Day

I wonder what’s happening. Here. Anywhere but here. Maybe tomorrow. Maybe on the other side of this blue screen light. There’s the smell of new car leather and antiseptic refreshment. The clap of heels against dirty pavement. Stiletto and shiny patent leather. Catsuits are what one would term exciting should they live here. In eternal cotton

It just doesn’t make sense. The slap of blush against skin. Waking up in the morning to find all your stuff gone and just a note of explanation. “I’m leaving.”--“I’m already gone” is the only response that comes up in the minds back alley ways.

And there’s refreshment in the taste of cardboard packing boxes being opened for the first time. Coats the air in the dust of new beginnings. An encasement.

A tomb you’d been casing for months.

She’s there. On her knees, coffee mug on the right hand side. Folding clothes, stuffing the corners full of sweaters and ratted T-shirts to be worn on grocery outings or around the home. Private cloth for the self only. The suits and dresses are hung up, unslumped.

Her dark hair billowing up in humid clouds. Sighing and grunting in turn as she shifts her weight from one shoulder to the other. Lifting the mug of coffee to hook her nose around the brim and sip. It was cold an hour ago.

The coffee mug will disappear too. When you’re done using it. The last grounds washed out and the porcelain allowed to dry on the countertop before it’s stuffed in and around old newspaper.

There are only stagnant memories here now. A memorandum instillation piece. Modern art in apartment buildings across the world over. A dime a dozen and precious. Each and every one.

For what used to be.

Wished for and dreamed. Reality was never more than a threatening phone call away. The bills behind and the ache of a neck bent over bracketed figures. At the kitchen table. Living room. On the floor.

Who lives here now?

Not her. Not me.

No one.

The scurry against homelessness. The audit of income and education. Will you have careers or go back to the dead end that gets by? Dream extravagant and learn to in actuality settle for less than nothing explaining that it was a good deal that needed to be jumped on. No moving truck. An ex-boyfriends truck and too much beer.

So then there is of course, the occupation of a new environment. Scrubbed clean of its old residents. Only their recollections remain. Scrubbed clean and perverted by your own. What?

Smell

Grime

Habitation.

You have a big job to do.

These are boxes we live in. To pick up and move when the year is out. The lease is up. The job is done. Whether we were ready to or not. They contain us and we are contained by them. Contented or mal--, there is no matter here.

A dime a dozen.

And inept.

The maintenance man must fix it when we’re gone.

And Forgotten.