Buildings live you know
They have moods and sounds
Pains and hungers
Usually, they’re happy to sit back
Let us fill them with ours
But when they’re empty
They express themselves
These walls hold secrets
Thousands of them
You can see it in the shadows
The long, empty corridors
Hear it in the creaking doors and hinges
If you find the right place
And have the patience
The building will speak to you
Most people don’t have the time
Me, I’ve got nothing but
I’ve got my secrets too you see
The building knows this
That’s why we share
Bound together
We reveal to each other and no one else
There’s no one else to listen
Most don’t even see me
The old man at the desk
And they don’t see the building
Just its parts
Some, the worst perhaps, do acknowledge me
Dropping the odd cheerful hello
To reassure themselves that they’re not a snob
Most flit by
Up in the lifts to the gods
Then back down to me at the close of business
First the exodus at 5
Then the slow trickle out of the busy and the put upon
the desperate, the stoic, the determined and the lonely
As the human and the electrical hum dies down
That’s when the building rises in confidence
And we begin to fill the void with our sound.
All’s I have is my keys and my radio
And a dirty brass lamp
That illuminates the dust left over from all the bodies
But I like it being close with the building
A while ago
A new man upstairs
Tried to separate us
He was a man with his eye on the bottom line
Roving security patrols on contract are cheaper
It wasn’t right though
He didn’t understand the relationship me and the building had
So we made a plan
We called down the man upstairs
One night
To show him the other side of the building
And now he understands what we have
Because he’s part of it too
Another ghost
In the walls
By Kenn Taylor
Kenn Taylor 