John Lennon

When you buy a house,

there are always mundane ghosts

left behind to haunt you:

Kitchen drawers teeming with instruction manuals

obituaries of long-gone appliances.

A well-worn cardigan forgotten in a closet,

cigarette butts piled in a coffee can on the porch,

decades old beer bottles with illegible labels

cracked, tossed into the crawl space.

Chairs circled in the basement

where the dead might sit

telling tired stories of dinners shared

in the warmer rooms of the house.

It’s juvenile,

my fear of the basement,

but I always imagine the worst.

as if real ghosts collect like cobwebs

when a crawlspace goes unkempt

or poltergeists are the culprits

behind the clanging pipes.

So forgive me for sprinting up the stairs

like the seance starts

as soon as I shut the lights off.

It’s easy to conjure up

cold spots and lingering spirits

in a house you are still learning to love.