To Check Before Leaving - Poem

To Check Before Leaving

J, we’ve heard noises from your rafters
Of the chairs you've rearranged
If your tenancy is up
Remember everyone rents once

- Leave a note for us. We’ll need a way
To reach you, since we’ll always stay in touch.
Perhaps we’ll meet this girl across the bay.
We’ll visit you, sometime.

- Make sure you never leave that dog alone
When you go out like that he finds a way to damn piss on everything
And we don’t want to pay to clean the carpets you don’t own
Don’t leave smells or stains for someone else to clean – don’t be like that

- You might give a last
Cup of coffee to the woman upstairs
Who just liked talking to make noise and dig up past
Indiscretions from you young people. Just do that much for her.

- If there’s a loved
One I can call to forward all the letters and the one-off magazines
Leave the name behind.
Though don’t hold your breath. It’s not our job.

- Don’t take a long
Time hoping that you’re not forgetting something.
That’s the real cost of renting
All those things you leave behind.

Context and Conceptualization:

This was my submission for a prompt from Becausewerepoets. The idea was to take a list we had on hand and make a poem out of it. The form was already taken care of - how could I resist.

The inspiration was a list my less-than-pleasant neighbors left on my door. Really lovely bunch. They always know to call the cops when I have a friend over to watch Game of Thrones and drink port, but know to show some restraint when the girls nextdoor play their dubstep at two in the morning.

The actual list was:

-Are you moving?

-If you are leave us a note with your information so we can forward your mail

-Do you still have that dog?

-Don't forget anything!

So I embellished, obviously.

Process:

The idea in my mind while I wrote this poem "These people would hear if I hung myself from the rafters, but just leave a note asking if I'd moved out."

I address the list to "J" - admittedly, my own first initial, but I actually intended it to be an ambiguous reference to Jay Gatsby. J is just an easy letter to use, since it's also got Jesus and Jehovah if you need to draw on that, and I always need to draw on that. Always.

Whether or not "noises from your rafters" and "rearranged chairs" is enough to imply suicide depends on the morbidity of the reader, I think. Either way, it's not primarily a poem about suicide, it simply has that alternative angle.

"Everyone rents once" is not a line I'm happy with. The idea is that "everyone rents (at least) once (in their life)" but the other implication I needed was that people only have one life to live - and we only rent our life for a short time. It's too blunt - obviously people like myself will rent plenty of times. This is the least of the poem's problems.

There are five stanzas in the actual "list" portion of the poem, indicated by dashes. Each stanza is lightly scented by the five stages of grief. Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, Acceptance. I do mean lightly scented.

Also, to emphasize the cyclical nature of renting, how things come and go in our lives, I decided to break the first line of each stanza with a portion of the last and first sentence of James Joyce's Finnegans Wake, namely

"a way, a lone, a last, a loved, a long the..." the last sentence

"rivverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay..." the first sentence.

I also did this to give the poem a little more structure. I rhymed the third line with the first of each stanza.

The first stanza, denial, paints the speakers as vested in the renter's life. Taken as a poem of suicide, it's the relatives and friends demanding a note - some way to convince themselves that they can still contact the lessee whose taken his life. The girl across the bay is sadly the extent of the J = Jay Gatsby reference. Of course, there's no reason really to believe it's not a sincere gesture. Depending on who left the list, they really do intend to keep up with the lessee, and this becomes a poem of well wishing - a pleasant goodbye.

The dog leaving a mess is both a reference to my neighbors mad obsession with the dog a friend brought over once. They have since assumed I've smuggled it into my apartment and intend to unleash some terrible odor on them. But also, it's the Anger. It's the idea that the person leaving, either the apartment complex or life, will leave a mess and be a problem and have nasty repercussions that the speakers will have to deal with.

Bargaining. The last cup of coffee. Talking to make noise. An old woman - gossipy and lonely. The image is almost archetypal these days. The small ways we influence peoples lives while we have our short lease on Earth, and in our apartments. The idea that our last encounter will somehow be too cruel - too much - and thus extend itself - refuse to be the last encounter.

The last is vaguely depression, though it just comes off as bitter, I think. There's such a terrible hollowness to the "one-off magazines" we order and lose interest in and never bother to cancel. I felt it made a nice symbol of the way people hang around somehow after they've left. People who move away still flash across our social networking - drop in at holidays. People who die have their clothes with their smell that just hangs, though you never noticed it when they lived.

"That's the real cost of renting, all those things you leave behind." Kind of funny. I just know I'll leave something small and terribly valuable in this apartment. Of course it means more than that.