I don't often write political poems
and I didn't know I was writing one when I wrote this one.
It's called "Living in Someone Else's House,"
and it's about doing that for many years of not having a house
of my own traveling around very much connected
to the rootlessness that I told you about before.
But in the course of writing the poem,
I start to understand that any time we're
living in someone else's house in the broadest sense,
it's a political statement of a kind
that any time you're uncomfortable in someone else's
house, in a country, the same thing.
So the metaphor, I start to understand the metaphor
in at least a couple of ways.
"Living in Someone Else's House."
"The house we never built for ourselves begins to surround us,
its foundation smelling like old breath
like what lies around too long in the pit of the stomach.
We are unable to sleep in these houses made by someone else.
These furnished rooms we come to,
these outposts and the valleys of our expectations.
Where we would have windows, there
are portraits of landscapes, there
are portraits of Windows opening out onto landscapes
and the doors open too easily into the sunshine
which is just a billboard in the neighborhoods of the poor.
In these houses, the ceilings are so perfect,
there's not a single invitation to an angel.
Our hope smack into them and we are afraid to move.
We find ourselves stuck to the floor dynamite in our hands
and our hands waiting for the orders we wish we could give
them."