Haikus on the Home

By Nicholas Dinielli

[Scene: nighttime; late, and dark. The buzz of the overhead street light is an incessantly ringing doorbell, the arrival of a thousand unsolicited guests who refuses to accept that no one is home, or, rather: those who are home refuse to answer.]

Dried up baby's breath
scatters across the table
when windows open.

Morning, glorious
Flowers planted evenly - 
an unfurled, blooming,

immobility.
Frozen, with a lost Terror,
unable to cope -

Vernacular bricks,
a responsibility
of preservation.

Sunny Afternoons -
I once had something to do -
and children played There.

Great-grandpa had dreams:
a tenement couldn't last,
it wouldn't sustain -

Grandpa turned to crime
as a form of expression,
never writing well -

he could hardly sing,
although he beat up the guys
who crooned on corners.

Daddy: the last hope -
he would be the redeemer,
the one to succeed.

"Move him up, northbound
where trees outnumber people"
the teachers engaged

his affinity
for numbers - (came from bookies
who taught him to bet

when business was slow.)
then, he crafted his own codes
and built a desktop.

I am left with this
legacy of binary
in my own new form.

faded nostalgia:
the potential energy
lingers in silence.

Inherited space,
a story of love and loss -
the heirloom; gold cross.