Winter Coat

I’m shedding.

Tufts of me color concrete floors

in empty rooms,

uncluttered and amnesiac,

names dropping off and

bouncing on unpainted walls,

scarred by the coming and going

of couches and chairs

and beds and bedfellows;

I linger in hallways.

Echoing and hallowed,

hollow and unhurried

I gaze vacuously at

vaporous pledges of

nothing in particular that

float like smoke and lint and

disappear behind thick curtains of

thin assurances of

painted walls and Persian rugs in

perfect shades of promise.