Our House Is Burning Down, But Everything Is Fine Poem by Kevin Patrick

Our centerpiece was simmering, ossifying porcelain
As a scorched and rotten bouquet was eating by its Just Deserts
Black carcasses of silverware molted from the wear and tear
Crumbling in pretty wrecks of matrimonial bric-a-brac
Soon the mantlepiece sweated the timebomb of a portrait
A family of hostages, caged with smiles of desperation
Grins choked of locked resentment and fervid eyes of tension
spotless built to blow in spontaneous combustion

The carpets masked the landmines we were forced to walk
And the Iron Curtin's worked to keep prying neighbors out
We learned to bite our lips and keep our feelings locked
Sticking to a script where our antipathy took spore to spout
Our bedrooms were the foxholes that saved us from the barrage
Through Fathers tumor tongue and mother's static wrath
We watched their shadowboxing become a fatal montage
Where affection was a car crash and a slow and gleeful bloodbath


All these years the airs tip toes in a powder keg of silence
With subtle accusations and back issues of marked grudges
With little things that spiral into subtle hints of violence
And all we're left is broken truths of self-anointed Judges
Surviving in a gilded cage we call a third world marriage
Where love is stuck in poverty of house-proud demagogues
And appearances are everything in the pumpkin Carriage
Waiting for our happy ends on the hair of rabid dogs


Now the final straw has dropped and the living rooms ablaze
Our kitchens being chocked in black widows billows smoke
The fire alarms blaring through the atmosphere's malaise
The doors are locked and molted in the window are all stoked
Flames grow high and lithely spry around the dinner table
Where mother shines a steak knife as father reads his paper
Shrugging off the inferno that eats our families stable
As the children eat their pea soup and slump into the vapors
They paid the cost and earned a lost to keep their hearts defrost
picture perfect meltdown like a nuclear family holocaust



"Our house is burning down, but everything is fine"