Five poems from Rented Lives | June 2026
I see myself running down a pock-marked street with pimples
the size of oranges on my back. Someone is chasing me.
I look behind and I see mathematical equations and a few
words in Spanish. The day is night-colored and I have to jump
over neon bulbs that flash warnings about invading cockroaches
and falsified bills of sale. In my hand I carry a hand missing
all of its fingers and a paint brush I can’t hold on to. I curse
in French and manage to slip into a forest where I sprout
branches. At brunch or communion, I listen to my father’s
lecture on ownership. I awaken to green sheets tucked under
my chin. I’m exhausted. Dreams are bounced checks. Dreams
are showdowns. During the day I walk slowly, a touch
of John Wayne swagger. At night I run, as I have since
I was thirteen my face cut open at third base by a sliding
steel spike, and a nurse holding me with tears. I learned
empathy then. For years I was ugly, empathy a companion,
until college when sports hardened me, as did graduate school,
as did marriage, as did the years when banks said pay now
or you lose all, as did the night a tenant held a gun to my face
until he stopped shaking. I can be kindly—when someone’s
condition hauls me back into memory, but I tend to
to first sentences only. I know your name but I’m not good
at facial recognition. I won’t remember you.
You’re two months behind, in arrears, abaft.
That’s blood on the tail of an unforgiving sun.
Let’s say you’re a dried-up umbilical stump,
diaper refuse, the last thing a father smells
on his way out.
Nothing
is where we come from, and I signed
an open-ended lease, so you can’t get
cash-in-hand from my absence
and expect me to pay for jurors
who would judge me a grifter or worse.
I am a tenant of the earth, alive or dead,
and if anything you should pay me
for my resolve.
I walk-thru your sad necromancy—
a Lug Life clock, one soleless sandal,
a hieroglyph of owls in the corner.
You say your deposit should be returned.
I have seen a Laughing Falcon disappear
in the Rain Forest. We take nothing with us
but our plumage and the number of years
we survive. I am sixty-five. Go now.
I’ve listened in. Watched from the hallway.
Walls smell like the inside of old shoes.
From the empty kitchen a grinning songster
intones “Solamente Una Vez,” and then breaks
for tea time (you’re kidding!). Old Chen stirs
chá from Shishi, Pedro thickens té from Mérida,
Buckhead adds a dab of Johnny Walker
to a jar from Aaron’s Pantry, Turkeytown, TN.
“Any juicy orange chunks in that mess
y’all brew?” and the endless squabble resumes,
cheap shots as regional and universal
as harvesting arugula in the fall. Who will be
the first to fart-laugh, miss the corner spittoon,
scribble Puszy under the KilZ, check the clock?
Time. Slowly, from cracked linoleum, they rise
in a strained harmonious stanza of grunts,
a United Nation of hands reaching for other
hands to pull them up. They vote aye,
and then like maps of other countries, turn
toward their place in the universe. The floor
needs sanding, change locks, replace blinds,
separate strong from delicate teas.
Apt.2, now vacant, a marvelous space where walls laugh
at starting-over jokes and bad dreams lick the poison behind
the stove and die. Rooms are cooled by a mostly quiet AC,
the doors have dead-bolts, your neighbor has a photo signed
by Spiro Agnew, and in the laundry shed soap dispensers
occasionally work. Don’t worry about the scratching behind
baseboards. We welcome guests without a green card.
For all tenants, empathy, that wonderful word, empathy
brings us together in the backyard for a summer cook-out.
A chance to hear the face that walks by your window
every morning toward the ’91 chevy (WASH ME, PLEASE).
She smiles, does not mention the bruise under her eye.
Maybe the old man in the lawn chair will talk about Trotsky
or explain the mysterious origins of dolomite. Maybe
the landlord will show up, a return of the knight-errant.
You have to have a place to live. You have tried the hollows
of a distant alley, a warm cuddling in a mother’s armpit,
the underbelly of a tanker. For a life that’s always elsewhere,
you have mastered homelessness, anonymous, on the move.
You are your own home until walls fall down. Then the dark
isn’t where it was yesterday. We do paperwork. The closets,
tub, bedroom floors are as clean as a maternity ward.
Find your own way here. You can stand in sunlight
in the kitchen and wail like you’ve been born again, again.
No hell. No Zodiac cycles. No Baskervilles, our apartments
are civilized, modern mess allowed: aerosol mist, popcorn,
closet laundry, dumbbells, sink dishes, unmade beds, stacked
calendars, comic books, and no dogs. A mouse may sneak in
under a cabinet, squirrels may thump in the attic, flies fly,
but no Shug Monkeys haunt the stairways or Black Shucks
howl or prowl. No dogs. If one, sauntering by on the sidewalk
with master in-hand, squats in our bottlebrush bushes, prickly,
no harm, but next time pooch may swerve from the posted sign
No Dogs Allowed
