Quaint and Shoddy

Quaint and Shoddy

On the west corner, where vine and gate intermingle,
There’s a quaint yet shoddy house of wood and wrinkle
Dying on this desolate street.  Weakened veins of crumbling mortar
Run through her heart and soul and bleed through every quarter.

She shudders and breathes shallowly in her crypt of faded memories and nightmares.
Some nights when I pass by I swear I hear whispers from under the stairs,
Chanting a mystical spell to destroy her ills and woes;  to slow her aging;
Suspend her impending death; take one more day from its savage raging.

On the eastern edge of the west corner of hedge and flowers
This antique unkempt house has clocked too many tears, too many hours;
Hours of inequity; inebriation, sobriety, love, and hate;
Undigested like broken glass;  bitter to the palate, sour to the taste.

Oh, such a bankrupt waste of smiles, grimaces, fleeting fury and emotion;
Ghostly spectres drowning in tepid tidal waves upon a dry rot ocean.

A gunmetal gray raincloud threatens on the northern corner of heartache and tears
Then manifests a phantom circus of sad clowns parading through the years.
Looking back through a foggy cracked looking glass I glimpse myself;
Hold the image to my breast;  polish it;  memorize it,  then put it back on its rusty shelf.

How like that quaint shoddy little house of wood and wrinkle I’ve become,
Pining for a past I can’t recover; things done and undone; Songs sung then unsung.
A hazy drifting memory wriggles its way through the barbed wire of my mind.
Resentments and regrets long-buried unearth themselves on spools I don’t want to unwind.

These dusty and frayed film noirs better left unwatched, flash off and on before my eyes.
Old masquerading faces rip their well-worn costumes off.  There is no doubt, no disguise.

Banking off a wild southwestern wind I’m forced to face my wanton ghosts of yesterday
They’ve chased me down at last; found me unarmed, unable to chase them away.
Reality has painted me a tad more quaint and shoddy now, than when I’d  first begun,
I see my life, myself, my journey; what I was, and what I have become.

I’ve run the rapids, raced the good race, and jumped fast to the gun in the long run,
And now the end is closing in.  The shadow looms. The days grow short spent in the sun.

On the west corner, where vine and gate intermingle,
There’s a quaint yet shoddy house of wood and wrinkle
Dying on this desolate street.  I stand vulnerable and naked at her door.
Where sky and fog and shadow meet one last time, then…. nevermore.