The Basement

I sleep in the cellar where its door leads towards the attic of my mind, Empty spaces filled with passage debris that has been left behind. Sitting atop dust, beneath cobwebs that float in the flickering lights, Of shadeless bulbs whose bare bodies blind my blinking sight. "Tis cold" whispers the window whose sill lets slip in the slithering wind, For a broken ice-machine tube drips through a window I've opened. Ticking like a clock every drip-drop spills to the ground outside, Mocking the rain that feigns the fall from grace on gravity's downward ride. I hover towards the door that leads to the back where the yard still roams, Of the corner-perched 19 Pidgeon Drive house my family now calls "home." It sits upon where two streets converge into a perpendicular pair, On the point at which the axis of their segment lines do share. I pull a butt from my pocket and suck its smoke, Gleaming out towards the darkened woods that croak. Moonlight crackles against the whistling tendrils of winterized breaking limbs, Just as does the spark of my cigarette's cinders swirl the air in which it swims. Each breath of tobacco sinks me into the heavy self I sail, The ship that sways from left to right to feel the Earth inhale. As I puff my final poison plucked from the white and yellow stick, I withdraw back into the dwelling's doorway and light a candle with a Bic. The candle illuminates the concrete crevices of this underworld, Casting shadows to dance and play on the walls in iridescent swirls. To cast light upon the deepest and darkest depths of a house, Is what I must do to my self, before I rise satisfied, like Faust.