[Current Poem] [Poetry Archive] [TimHinkle.com]

"Closing In"

The people down the hall are frightening—
one man has a swastika tatoo on his back.
They yell day and night to be heard over each other and the television;
sometimes it's hard to sleep through that.

This damned apartment's just too small for us.
There are boxes stacked all the way up the wall.
They're full of things we haven't seen since we packed them up to move here.
When I walk past I'm scared that some boxes may fall.

My wife looks at houses with great longing
which she does nothing to conceal.
When the bank turned down our loan application they said the reason was
so far as they could tell, I wasn't real.

A fantasy man, in a fantasy land—
No walls contain me,
No tethers restrain me;
I could fly away,
fly away.

This tiny space keeps shrinking smaller;
my rocking chair's squeezed in the kitchen now.
The walls are closing in on us and soon they'll press us into red jelly.
I'd like to leave this place today, but I don't know how.