A STEP-BY-STEP GUIDE TO BUYING A HOME
1. Decide if buying a home is right for you
Tomorrow morning, wake at dawn and look up at the sky
consider if it might fall, crack open and/or turn
and whether you ever want to see it again.
2. Decide if you should sell first
In your head, price tag your belongings, weigh up
the weights in your life and wait to see if they add up
to a mass that has value, a total that others would want.
3. Decide on your budget
Is that total, the sum of your life’s worth anything
to anyone? Does it hold up to your self-worth
and is it worth more or less than your intangible parts?
4. Get your finances in place
Stack coins in order of cleanliness,
notes in order of softness
cheques in order of love.
5. Decide where you want to live
Compare the surface of the sun with the moon,
dredge up the pond and place the fish on the line,
breathe in the air from every continent before dying.
6. Choose a specific property
Make sure to lick each brick and twang the aerial,
consider the lives that have passed by and if they looked
in the window, imagined themselves living in the living room.
7. Make an offer – and get it accepted
Offer skin, offer tea cosies, offer light,
offer the tie around your neck, offer offal,
offer more than you have by one single petal.
8. Arrange a mortgage
Turn left at the hospital, go past the charity shop,
turn right at the pharmacist, round the back of the library,
opposite the primary school—there you’ll find the devil’s door.
9. Hire a solicitor or conveyancer
File down a lucky coin and drag it along your palm,
let the blood settle on tissue paper, the iron
and fibres embracing on their desk.
10. Decide if you want a survey
See! The cracks! Hear! The mice!
Smell! The damp! Taste! The dust!
Touch! The emptiness in every room!
11. Arrange a deposit
Gather your friends and family, sit them
around a fire, build that fire to the tallest tree
and ask them to collect every ash flake.
12. Exchange contracts
Eyes – Fish Tank – Rollerblades – Steak
– Cape – Hatred – Job – Subordinates – Balaklava –
Cocktails – Horses (contracts exchanged)
13. Final arrangements and negotiations
I was engaged at four to my mother’s hairdresser’s
daughter. I can still feel her tiny hand in my mine
but I can’t remember her name.
14. Complete the sale
Shake hands across the threshold, make eye
contact for a second too long, make this uncomfortability
part of the process, remember their joyful regret.
15. Take possession of your new home
Lock the door, lie on the floor, stare at the ceiling,
the new plaster sky that is yours to paint anew
and a future you will make from someone else’s past.
—from Rattle #83, Spring 2024
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Luigi Coppola: “While unpacking some (decade old?) boxes since our last house move (the scene from The Incredibles springs to mind), I was inspired by the title and headings used for an article from the HomeOwners Alliance website to write about the process, the headaches, the joy of a new house and then home. Various memories came flooding back, from childhood to adulthood, all compartmentalised but through various literal/metaphoric/symbolic lens, recalling Marianne Moore’s ars poetica within the longer version of her poem ‘Poetry’: ‘imaginary gardens with real toads.’” (web)
