Christos Floratos
Mommy asked me what I thought
of the Grey House.
So tall. Was all ours. Spring was a few seconds away.
Earth to sky. You could even see the clouds pass on by.
Mommy smiled when I jumped in glee.
Mommy asked me where the sky ended.
Why, at the top of our Grey House, of course!
And that’s where we went.
Right to the top, gazing where fans swirled, and birds lost all their feathers.
Mommy laughed when I said mine was what the light touched.
But the darkness was Mom’s own.
She had raged warfare before but nothing as
the campaign she waged on the phone.
There were many battles lost and Mom neither
won that war. The damned operators she wrestled.
The grey hut was starting to shamble
and the darkness of Mom’s words transfixed
themselves with the light bulbs,
and those showers thereafter returned the childhood achoos.
I was reprimanded for being late at school,
But mother was bedridden. What was I to do?
Set out – almost barefoot. Along my journey
on the cigarette path, I met Crystal, Molly,
was tracked by a Dragon and became BFs with Mary Jane.
I had to leave that woman when I came of age.
For she said we’d be home by autumn’s end.
But there I sat in
an apartment that made squalor shiver,
and a boyfriend here, and over there.
She cried when my departure loomed overhead.
She was neither the executioner nor the criminal
but the wife of the bread-thief.
I was the void between Venus and Mars,
Water and a pot-plant balcony garden constituted my celestial body.
That woman, her promise of a time yonder our
dilapidated apartment…
was a dream of hollow mines and sore minds.
Maybe I will return to her; she was my parent, after all.
This was an exodus much sooner than expected.
© Christos Floratos 2019
Christos Floratos 