The Echoes of Cartwright House

A house, already indeed too big for its plot of land,

contains far too many rooms to make any real use of them.

Built on the rocky edge of a watery, trickley kind of cliffside,

any bigger and it would slough right off the side,

perhaps finally finding contentness at the bottom of the shallow lake.

Children used to throw rocks at the windows,

until all the children grew up and no more were born.

Such is the way around watery, trickley kinds of cliffsides.

And as such, abandoned but for its sulky, sunken owner,

the house, already self-consciously empty, is nearly obsolete.

Inside, a sprawling foyer, dim and dusty, greets not a single soul.

Beyond, the staircases spirals out into four sections:

both above and below ground level, left and right sides.

Upstairs, a hallway stretches longer with each tick of the grandfather clock,

leading to fractals of spare, stale, and unwittingly spacious rooms.

Through an ornate doorframe, its door unhinged but hanging on,

rests the sitting room, possessions coughed about and left as reminders.

Twenty steps further, and there lay a Mr. Cartwright,

needing naught but a roof, bed, and the unavailable doctor,

coughing up blood into his pillowcase, suffocatingly alone.

And circling him, rectangling to be precise,

is the faded yet ostentatious striped wallpaper,

glaring across the room at what once may have been its only friend.

The last thing, in fact, that poor old Cartwright ever lay eyes upon

is the meretricious meticulousness of those dear lines.

Confined to his strictly horizontal position, he, in his last moments:

acknowledges the unparalleled craftsmanship of these parallel lines,

contemplates owning a house of this unprecedented size,

and with his final breath condemns the walls for their infinite lies.

Then, contained by the echoing, expanding, empty house, he dies.