I mix metaphors like swirling paint
setting up the dominoes
and watching them fall like a house of cards

I saddle my pawn-like nouns
with churlish adjectives
until they forget the person, place, or thing they once were

My verbs are lavishly garbed in adverbial robes
dancing ghoulishly
in the transitive light

I sidestep fields of cliched words
like heart, and darkness, and night
because such words cast a shadow over my soul

I use punctuation; in unusual places
I drop comma bombs and end
lines in the middle of

I can rhyme, though I
don’t love it. I feel my style
is well above it. Do you like enjambment too?

I can plod along in iambic pentameter
but nothing rhymes with iambic pentameter
except maybe flyamric plemtamater

I weave words together for impact
playing fast and loose with syntax
my rhyming scheme to keep intact

I stumble across some clarity
in my worn-through pages of Ariel
and let those words work through my pencil

Until allusion becomes larceny
Though they always knew it was you
Poetry, poetry, you fool, I’m through.

Sure, the apartment itself is roughly the size of the handicap stall in the bathroom at the airport Ramada, replete with its own bathroom that makes a port-a-potty seem like the presidential suite at the Luxor.  Did you follow that?  Summary: small apartment, even smaller bathroom.  But it’s not the apartment I’ll miss, though there is something spiritual about forced simplicity.

What I’ll truly miss is the atmosphere.  On a night like tonight, my wife out of town, I step out the door into the cool night, the air sweet with a melange of grilled meat, second-hand marijuana, and honeysuckle, carried on the backs of fireflies blearing in the serenade of rolling, unhurried conversation that swells to laughter before receding into murmurs.  The night does something special to the complex; the light of day exposes the cracks, the separations, the breaks, ushering in its own agenda and ambition, but the night wraps us all in its wings, shadowing the outside pull that drives our isolation.  At night the complex lives, it inhales the exhaustion of an over-wrought people, whispers softly that, for a moment, we might be a nation, a group all our own, that we might experience the joy of not being sold anything, of not owing anything to anyone outside of the faces before us.  At night, the complex is a pulsing, vibrating organism, where children playing in the slice of light cut into the darkness by the lightpoles and doorside lamps, blur into a bokeh of shape and color and contrast.

Sometimes I think I was created for communal living.  Neighborhoods become containers, shelves for little boxes of people.  Being with other humans, with friends, sharing words, food, passions, anger, fears, insecurities, sharing life is something from which I never tire.  I crave it.  While the isolationist momentum of suburban living has instilled a voice of separation, nagging on that people shouldn’t need each other, shouldn’t need engagement outside of their home and family, every cell in my body cries out for community.  That’s why, on nights like tonight, I think about moving into our new house, three times the size of this tiny apartment, and I let myself feel a little joy, and a little sadness.