Untitled Poem from State of the Wards

Impulse buying is not confined to the checkout line, to the one-click purchase. This house, for example, where the doorways are large enough to enter, but too narrow to leave through. Where each door opens into a slightly smaller room. My parents, for example, whom I chose based on a gross misconstrual of the facts. I took the lack of regional accent to denote lack of region. I conflated chronic bad credit with a dependable incredulity. I saw the patrilineal lack of eyeteeth as a categorical dismissal of biblical notions of jurisprudence. I took the absence of a second story as a dare, I took it one night, scaling a ladder to sleep out on the tar paper, wondering whether I, like the universe, was the result of a decision that never reached consciousness, wondering what was wrong with everyone. What I missed was that the missing second story was just their little way of repudiating the equation of verticality with the sacred. At the sight of the morning star, I found a way off that roof that would forever erase my impulses.