Landlord Apathy

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1
In the winter the living room is cold.
We stuff a rolled up scatter rug at the front door
to seal in the elusive warmth, a simple unadorned warmth,
like yesterdays happiness,
invisible. Without the rug, air slipped in, allowing the room a chilled, outdoorsy embrace.
Lisa, the landlord, or awful lordess, refused us a storm door...the sly mouthed whore,
so winter nearly creates showy white breath in the house.
Rhapsody engaged,
spilling coldly, inhumanly.
Early Februrary drives us together.
Landlord apathy is useful here, though, perhaps wasted
on loveless auras; there is no togetherness, only an five year otherness.
We put that rent check in her mailbox, fattening her, diminishing us;
its the American way, devouring itself month by month. 
We have to live somewhere in the world, this expensive and destructive world.


2
She had smiles
left there on her face,
deceptive,
and we learned that
manners meant nothing
to the ones who owned.
Tricked again
odd domestic bliss
in our bones. The ants come in summer,
millions
of a tiny black mass,
as human as the landlord--though wordless.
Till then--
the cold. No season here seems safe,
in a elemental city as this: basic, raw, 
and wrapped in subtle extremes.

Three days of growth,
all wooly and bemused,
gray/black hairs, flattened forest
of facial shrubs to touch, to rub,
to feel the prickliness
of man,
to allow the roughness of
untouched cheek and chin
to belie the soft senstivity
within.
Did Keats have wild hair
hanging from his visage?
Abrasive stems
jutting out into his life,
tranfixing his own meaning?
Not in the photos I've seen.
Soft Keats. Soft man. Soft me.
So grab no enemy razor,
whirring cutter of strand-life.
Leave it rough today,
belie that softness,
undermine the reasoning
behind being kempt.
In the mirror, at least, 
staring out, Keats influenced
but bearing no lingering resemblance,
is a glorious savage--and
with searing vision--
some Darwinian revenge;
God's not laughing.
He has his own noble beard,
longer than mine,
longer than the years
of several breathless worlds.


© Lamont Palmer

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