Now This Is the Life

Now This is the Life



So you sit alone all night
in your solitary confinement
and watch the cracks crawl
looming up the wall,
while your days pass before you.
And the broken old man
across the hall
stands with his ear to the door
while his days pass behind his eyes
he thinks of his cat, long dead and gone,
and wonders what this was all for.
While the woman upstairs,
desperately alone after the door slammed behind him,
decides to vacuum at two a.m.
So that the sound can kill all the others in her head.
Kill the wondering where he goes to
and why he comes back just to start things over again.
And she’s no goddam fool,
she knows we all can hear when he locks her out
on the balcony and she screams and the wounded
animals all around echo her pain.
She screams louder than her mother did at times like these.
And you sit there, angry as hell
because the vodka doesn’t cut it anymore
and the pills have all run dry
and the sound of that droning hum
does nothing to deaden the monster inside
that has been growing here all these years
Mutating inside these four walls.