Houses

When the police come to arrest him
tell them to put handcuffs on the door.
This house is a culprit, constantly watching us bleed without moving.

The first time he turned beast, the walls collapsed our screams into a song
and the neighbours thought we were dancing to a sharp melody.
This house will watch us get killed and say nothing.
The walls will wear our blood like paint,
Our DNA washes off into colour.
It is a ring in here, with only one boxing champion who gets to pick a fight.
Constantly we kiss the kitchen tiles,
Slowly rise to our knees,
Leave our blood mopping the floor.
We are learning prayer
With the celling slapping our words back to our tongues, There is a kind of heaven that we will never reach;
Where men don’t exist to molest women,
Where houses are not ghosts forcing a painful memory into our thoughts,
Where fathers love their daughters.

This house will let us die, The tiles will shallow our skeletons,
This house wants to be a graveyard.
There are sessions of memorial service in each bedroom
Old obituaries hanging like curtains,
Each morning, windows open to wave life goodbye.
Those who came before never won this war.

And those who came before were us,
We’ve been dying here each night.
But today police are coming
If we are dead when they come,
Tell them to take this house with him to a prison cell,
Because it got comfortable in watching us bleed.