House

The door is locked.
The key is lost.
You stand
outside your house
in the rain.

I have a key
to another house,
but it burnt down,
to the ground,
long ago.

We face each other,
with nothing to offer
apart from pain
and need,

and an absence
of conversation,
a silence,
consisting of trauma
and untold secrets
and memories of life
before ruin and decay,

but perhaps, together,
we have a chance.
Maybe this is really
a chance to escape.
Maybe we can
escape the past
together. Maybe, at last,
we can build
a new place to dwell,

a house of air
and hope and love
and freedom.