Thomas Lux - Cellar Stairs lyrics

Cellar Stairs It's rickety down to the dark. Old skates, long-bladed, hang by leather laces on your left and want to slash your throat, but they can't, they can't, being only skates. On a shelf above, tools: shears, three-pronged weed hacker, ice pick, poison-rats and bugs-and on the landing, halfway down, a keg of roofing nails you don't want to fall face first into, no, you don't. To your right, a fuse box with its side-switch-a slot machine, on a good day, or the one the warden pulls, on a bad. Against the wall, on nearly every stair, one boot, no two together, no pair, as if the dead went off, short-legged or long, to where they go, which is down these steps, at the bottom of which is a swollen, humming, huge white freezer big enough for many bodies— of children, at least. And this is where you're sent each night for the frozen bag of beans or peas or broccoli that lies beside the slab of meat you'll eat for dinner, each countless childhood meal your last. Thomas Lux