Matches
My home is a ramshackle shed. There is no electricity, no heat, no insulation. Just desperate old rags plug the spaces between the planks of wood. On winter nights when the wind blows hard I see my breath; I think of death. I sleep in my clothes, the blankets that cover me are threadbare. I just want it to get warm and live. My life is like a ramshackle shed. If I had a book of poems I'd burn it. But I don't even have matches and a chiminey smokes easy only in my minds eye. In the morning, if my heart still beats and my blood isn't frozen like a winter stream, I'll go to the library and get warm. I'll find people just like me. Some are different; they got skirmishs inside their heads. I ignore them. When I get food in my belly, like the soup from the church kitchen, I think I'm going to live long. But at night it gets cold. The rags pressed between the wood planks shake from the wind. Lucky I don't have matches, or I might light the rags and close my eyes and feel the warmth come to me like a last summer breeze.