The tenant's room

Begin to write
For the way through into the sane is here
Like stepping over a lintel
Into the tenant’s room,
‘quiet, spacious, near university, only R1600 a month, L&W included’
It is the same as the ones you have left behind you,
Waiting, like witnesses.

– No false redemption here
This is not a confessional
Not even the luxury of a category
Just a movement into, away from the familiar –

the furniture in it yours, but not
- skewed somehow, because
someone else lives here now,
The dust under the bed piled like snow,
Two cold shards from a broken wine glass
balanced into each other like hands, like daggers.

Strangeness surrounds
You
Like the stink of the lone garlic clove on the counter
Abandoned in a largeness of ceramic bowl,
Tacit tea candles diminished by the pink plastic cups
They sit in
The aluminium coffee maker with no lid.

This is the other
The mirror you do not want
- her photographs like small jagged shadows against a whiteness of wall,
an orange scarf severe across the window.

Rubbish rots in a Checkers packet beneath the sink,
And in the dimness

You seek words
To place
Like one of your son’s Shrek plasters
On the cut inflicted by neglect.

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