lying on an air mattress in my new house, two days after the new year

There’s this green light blinking

from somewhere behind the trees

bordering the property.

Not bright, but persistent,

impossible to ignore when lying

next to a door covered entirely in windows.

Without a pattern, it clicks off, only for a beat,

then floods the lawn with a sickly glow

like the ghostly orbs in those true haunting shows

I can’t seem to stop watching,

though I already decided the place isn’t haunted

because we saw the previous owner at the closing,

unmaimed, with a glinting smile.

This place moves by a different clock.

No minutes, no hours.

Staying at my friend’s lake house years ago,

we decided that dusk was a portal into

some dystopian universe where all the rules changed,

but I’d hoped for more than watching the stars

rise and set and rise again, a moonlit hike

that only ends when it feels like it.

My lantern is a lava lamp, one bought at

Wal-Mart a few hours earlier, and

though I always believed it when Mom told me

that Wal-Mart is evil, I spent the afternoon

buying things I’d always wanted in my room

but never got around to.

That’s what Florida does. Compromise.

Tuck my past life under one arm

while sunlight and beaches glitter

off his perfect teeth.

This is not my house.

It reminds me with every gulp

of dusty air it takes, in every

asthmatic wheeze, just so I won’t

be mistaken. It likes to pretend that,

even when boxed in by those

dark, hooded colors, that I could forget.

Isn’t it funny

how Florida is just as cold

as the place I left five days ago?

In the greenish pallor of that blinking light,

the ground looks more frozen

than any snow, a rock drifting in the orbit

of some warm planet, surrounded

by a whirlwind of stars that never go away.