It was a house born out of an empty graveyard,
shadowy lithograph of internal gravities.
Where the barren winter trees resemble naked humans,
exposing our experienced frames.

Inside, patinas form its infrastructure.
Moth-eaten scrim and forlorn couch stubs cripple away,
as termites gnaw at decrepit walls
which silently protest our nature.

The patio doors lay detached as our human connections,
while the wood flooring submits to its black holes.
As windows reflect a perpetual experience,
the forebearing cost of loss becomes the air, our air.

From my window across the street,
I seek the stories of its previous residents.
Landscape echoes their stories, the same words of
“An oddly sub-familiar connection” or “Feels like endless deaths.”

Based on my neighbor’s rumors,
one family’s complained of “their son’s reincarnation as the house”,
the eleven-year old who wandered into the surrounding forest,
whose dithering outline still suffuses in the air above.

Within years, everything had left except its old passersby,
those who cast stares toward it and understand.
Children walk by to risk glances, avoiding what will become
their future silhouettes.

Outside, the weedy hair of the dead scatter the lawn,
as the backyard trees propel a familiar dirge,
the elegy of our human selves.