Our Broken House

Cafe Locked Out

Out here, marooned in the wheat fields like the last crumbling splinters of a generations’ dreams, this broken house sun bakes below the sun who has long caved in its roof, and the winds who blew out its glass, until these liberated windows can no longer see the lovers who ripped these bricks up from this unforgiving earth, that I’m guessing too, repossessed and then lost their bones.

After the First Great War they gave this land away to any survivor with enough heart left to fight this dirt with their dreams.

A quiet land that these road-trains now, three dinosaurs long, roar below this ever-changing sky that will never end nor observes, unlike these Crows, who, while waiting forever for their roadkill breakfast are now watching you pass, because they’ve been here so long, they can still recall how you taste.

There is an old fridge with its door on the ground and its womb painted by the dust of the woman who I can see opening it for the first time.

She’s holding her hand in its miraculous cold and giggling like a little girl hiding inside the school toilets from the kiss-chasey boy she married before, together they would come out here and try to paint something that would last, with their souls.

All gone. Each and everyone, except these walls that are now being shaved, by this tide who is running its fingers through my hair, as I stand here trying to hear the heartbeats of these lovers who, left this house as a tribute to their stubborn choice to follow the harder dreams; that dinky-di, blood-stained liberty.

A freedom that we grew up taking for granted, that due to the sacrifice of these ghosts, would be forever beyond the reach of these tides.

Michael Gray Griffith