Upstairs

Go back to the street you first lived on.
Isn't this your life?
Left here in the yard
like a discarded toy, like a doll
that wets or cries tears
with forced open hands
and plastic unbending legs.
If you had dropped such a doll,
if no one had retrieved it,
it might still be here.
Undecomposing, plastic as eternity
only the grass to grow around it
like years
You would find the doll unfamiliar
as this street, as yourself.
Go into the house.
Go up the stairs you only climb in dreams
always into a different room.
This isn't where it happened.
Go home to the life you've made
out of pieces of the life you've forgotten.
Leave whatever you found on that street,
every half familiar thing that might have been yours
but wasn't.
A rusted bicycle chain, a dog collar, blue comb,
the half-licked all day sucker.
Leave everything.
You won't need it where you are going.
How often at home, you reach for the light switch
--having forgotten how late it's become
and that you're alone in this house;
you reach for the switch
and startle the house into darkness.