Moving houses is a strange thing.
It's strange to see cardboard boxes
Piled up where you used to sit and read.
It's strange to see the fridge,
Once covered in photos and papers and notes
Bare and seemingly lifeless.
It's strange to see walls you had lined
With material representations of memories
Clean and with no trace of your existence.
Will planet earth be like that?
A while after humans are gone?
It's strange to see your memories,
Your passions,
Your expressions,
Squished together in a cardboard box.
How can things that define your very essence
Fit in a cardboard box?
How can that cardboard box contain
Material representations of everything you've ever known?
It's strange to see beloved trinkets and
Miscellaneous objects thrown away,
Trapped in a trash can.
Not knowing that they too,
Played an important part in your life.
Yet there they are.
Concealed in a plastic trash bag
Because they wouldn't fit in a cardboard box.
What power does that box have over me?
Why should it decide
What parts of me I want to leave behind?
I leave behind parts of me
But nothing is left in the house I once called home.
Aside from indents in the carpet.
A small crack in a bathroom tile
From when I dropped a pair of scissors
When I gave my sister a haircut.
A dent in the wall
From when my cousins and I
Tried to play darts.
Smudges of graphite on the walls
From when my sister
Was working on a portrait
For a couple
Who's baby died at 2 years old.
A stain in the carpet
From when my brother
Knocked over a bottle of liquid paper
When he was playing tag with his friend.
Dark circles on the ceiling
From the glow-in-the-dark stars
That once protected and looked over me.
Now those stars are in the trash.
Now that pair of scissors is in a cardboard box.
When the moving trucks come
I will load cardboard boxes full of memories into them.
And when they are transported
I will cut away the packing tape
It will be like opening Pandora's box.
The things inside are tied to trepidations,
Fear, depression, anxieties, confusion...
But by opening those cardboard boxes,
I get to meet myself again.
Experience the feeling of holding a guitar
That had came from a box,
Turn the pages of my journals again,
Hang up all my posters and papers on the walls,
Get out the gardening tools and make something beautiful
Of the earth that us humans are killing.
I will find myself again.
Uncover all the colours and let them spill
Out over a bland house;
Out over my bland life.
Those cardboard boxes have caused me pain
And sadness and they will let me experience
The feeling of elation when you meet yourself again
Paired with the feeling of nostalgia of all the things
You left behind, all because of the cardboard box.
Moving houses is a strange thing.
A.N. I get very attached to material things. That's why I'm being moody about moving houses. :(( The picture is 'Liberty Leading the People' which is a painting by Eugène Delacroix and which was designed as a political poster and that snazzy dude Eugène painted himself into it as the fellow in the top hat. Life goals amirite?
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Shitty Poems
PoetryA collection of shitty poems that I have written. I own the cover. Constructive criticism would be great. Pls comment anything I live for comments and flowers. Infrequent updates.
