Particles of My DNA

 

Particles of my DNA can be found everywhere in this house. I have shed hairs and skin flakes and sweat and saliva in every room. I have left blood in this house while repairing its pipes and its wires, so even if you tore out the carpets and sanded away the paint and replaced the moldings, I’d still be in it. My blood, my sweat, my tears, my snot, my semen. I’ve made love with three wives and eight lovers in every room in this house, mourned the death of my grandmother and my mother and the stroke which has left my father a living dead man in every room in this house.

Come to think of it, my children also have part of my DNA, so you could mark my presence in this house by theirs: their skin and hair and semen and menstrual discharge.

Even the soil under this house has my mark on it, because I dug two-foot trenches in the eight-inch crawl space under it so I could work on the pipes, and left plenty of sweat and blood behind in the process.

So you just go ahead and evict me from this house, but you’d better know that I’m still in it, and you will never get me out of it.

 

 The Magic Eight-Ball says: "We all leave our traces."

https://poets.org/poem/brief-meditation-breath