In a Boarding House – Mark Parsons

June 1, 2026

I’m the only boarder in a boarding house
Run by a co-dependent packrat
Who follows a path through heaps of clutter
Like an animal in a game-trail.
Glassy-eyed,
Head held up with a velvet cervical pillow,
He shuffles in boxer briefs and athletic socks with padded toes.
His dragging foot polishes narrow parquet strips
Laid in a herringbone pattern,
Like the platinum chain I gave my wife
For our anniversary. The only tenant before me
Was a terminal, bedridden Jewess who paid
For half of everything, and the property taxes, too.
When she died a Nigerian prince was awarded her estate.
The would-be monarch keeps spamming the landlord with offers
To rectify the court’s mistake—who knows, maybe
This place will be in escrow soon, and I won’t have to deal
With checking out, or the cleaning and damages.
The disorder of junk and refuse grows
Like an invasive species of plant, groundcover
Conquering all the available space.
Common areas become unshared areas,
And then become un-shareable.
Days pass. The ephemeral debris of
Anonymous lives conspires to restrict me to my room.
At night the sick proprietor sits in a folding camp chair, bottle of craft beer
And his prescription of diazepam in the mesh cup-holders
Embroidered in each armrest, while he holds a flat TV antenna-amplifier
That looks like a Teflon spatula, cocked in the air
Like he’s about to swat some bat,
One only he can see. The rubbish increases.
Tributaries of buffed to gleaming zig zag wooden strips
That lead to where he sits all night till dawn
And maintains his tortured vigil narrow, constrict
Like veins and arteries in the body of a hypertensive patient.
Lit up by the flicker of a snowy, vertically rolling
Wall-mounted screen, he lists
Starboard to port, the matte black rectangle
Like the topsail of a sailing ship
Tossed in heavy sea,
Or an anti-capitalist protester’s flag
At a demonstration downtown, waving back and forth
Through fusty, unventilated melancholy air
A primeval glyph composed of silver bands encased in plastic.
No one’s ever married until they get divorced;
In the end is the beginning. No one switches sides,
But the game changes. Those at the bottom
Stay on the bottom, and those at the top stay on top.
What they fight for and what they defend and try to preserve
Called different names: some fight
For who or what they hope to be; others
To remain who they are. Some fight
For what they want,
Some to hold on to what they have.
In this endless book of night, pressed like flowers
Between hand-stitched pages of fresh-cut
Moonless dark, unfulfilled dreams and frustrated desires
Get transfigured and mapped like a diagram of analog circuits, a delicate glinting
Labyrinth swallowed in the gloom of a digital algorithm.