A Revised Edition of the Last Poem

One of these times I'm going to post my process on here. Everything I post are first or at least very early drafts. Here's this last poem with the stanzas flip-flopped and put into quatrains.

Where Craig Went

Inside this house,
the same party has played for 28 years.
Some gas station holiday mix booming brass enough
to rattle the half hung Christmas glitters,

the lights no one removed last year or any year.
The aging defiants will guzzle and chug, cuss and smoke
in the seventies colored kitchen, around the dartboard, the hallways,
on the couch slowly blackholing the sitters.

The same discussion, the same stats and half-knowledge
will erupt sometime in front of the game
discolored by the swelling sunspot on the tube.
And they will all egg each other on from drink to drink,

saying things about “Tonight!’ and “Could be our last!”
The night will wind into snores, into lawn pissing,
into some slipslur apology about a secret shared
they all knew and gossiped the year about already.

Craig has come back,
past the swing and unsteady of that gate
past a yard mowed like an afterthought,
beer cans kicked beneath spruce skirts,

leaves melting into mush and snow riming the street soot,
the freckles of cigarette filters,
the sprinkler, out-of-box sheen, upside down,
glazed in its frozen spittle.

Back, up the uneven heave of the walkway,
up to the door, new and swelled into the jambs.
This door too wrong for this slump,
mahogany molds dripping into shapes

as soft as sex, as duck down,
and glass frosted like the film of dreams.
Too real for a haunt, a patch on his memories;
so misplaced—a scepter holding up a tent.

It’s been 12 years. He feels the blood pull.
He should go inside, find a place.
His truck’s roar stirs the unconscious not a little.
The doorknob cools.