day 8, poem 8 - foreclosure

foreclosure

We dragged a car battery, an old mattress, several
empty bottles, back there, to the copse of trees
on the other side of the fence. Jeffrey Tongs
and I were stocking our fort; the one we built
of coconut branches, leaned up teepee-style
around a tree. We had no idea we were survivalists,
preparing to provide for families, protect loved
ones. We packed the earth down hard and tight
to make a good floor under it, and when the rain
began to leak through our make-shift rafters,
we got old rags to stuff the spaces up. And we blocked
the sun out of our makeshift teepee too, and we rolled
up a straw mat and dragged it back there, and found
a couple old pots and pretended we’d made a whole
secret life – and we swore no-one would ever find
it even though we could hear at recess the voices
of the other children, less than 50 metres away.

And when we left it, we drew it closed with one
more branch, like a tent flap, like a door, like a sliding
portal to our own personal Narnia, and we weren’t ever
surprised there, and even when we found one discarded
boot and our tent torn down, we didn’t panic
or run, or even imagine we’d been discovered. We built
it back up, experts now at this task of house-making;
swiftly stacking and leaning the long branches
against the trunk, working quietly – understanding
for the first time that our lives were made of desperation,
that nothing belonged to us, so we were not surprised
or even particularly heartbroken when it was not there
at all a week later when we returned – the mat, the car
battery, our raggedy roof-patching, all foreclosed on,
and so we did the little growing-up that such events force
on children, and moved on. Jeffrey and I had already been declared
the smartest boys in the school, another possession
against which I began a quiet revolt one year later,
with my fists, my feet, my discovery of the most obscene
words possible for a boy to fit his mouth around.

No house I wanted in on appeared buildable; my father
absent, my grandmother’s judgments sure and stern –
now even what my own two hands could make
was gone away.

Of what use was my body, my mind, reportedly
brilliant, my breath, held? I dared the world
in on me, mortgaged by body against its ravages,
began a slow dismantling of anything that seemed
certain in my body, waiting for the next
sure betrayal to find me.