The Formal Guest Room

Lyrics

The bourbon is low in the glass. The fire is ash. 
Time to check on the ghosts we keep.
To see if the performance is still set.

Up from the first floor, leaving the leather-bound silence of The Library behind.
Past the heavy dining table that remembers treaties signed in gravy and salt.
The main staircase groans the same chord it has since 1924.
A complaint so old it has become a welcome.

Second floor landing. The air changes here. It smells of sleep and secrets.
I turn left, away from the door to The Wife's Sitting Room. That silence is not mine to enter tonight.
The eyes of The Portrait Hall follow, judging the angle of my shoulders. 
And then, the last door on the right. Plain, white, expectant.

And here it is. The Formal Guest Room.
Where the bed is a perfect, unmarred field of white.
A landscape waiting for a body that will never leave its mark.
The pillows are plumped for a head that only dreams polite dreams.
This is the architecture of welcome. This is the geometry of distance.

The porcelain basin is cold, holding only the memory of water.
The writing desk is ready, the blotter clean save for the ghost of a signature from a senator in 1938.
He had a handshake like a closing vault. The air still feels dense where he stood.
There’s a single wool blanket, folded at the foot of the bed. It smells of cedar and time.
Everything in its place. A room holding its breath.

The small bar of lavender soap in its dish, never used, completely dry.
Its scent has a sound—a high, thin note that hangs in the air, the pitch of a polite refusal.
The mirror over the bureau doesn't show my face. It shows the idea of a guest. Honored. Temporary.
And on the nightstand, the anomaly. The single left-hand glove, forgotten in 1952. 
A question without a mouth. A story the room keeps to itself. A loose thread in a perfect suit.

And the bed. A perfect, unmarred field of white.
A landscape waiting for a body that will never leave its mark.
The pillows are plumped for a head that only dreams polite dreams.
This is the architecture of welcome. This is the geometry of distance.

I close the door. The lock clicks shut.
The performance is set. The room is ready.
Waiting for the next man who needs to be kept close, but not too close.