It is sometimes useful to imagine your housemates are dead

The tap has been left running and the floorboards are swollen
and now your socks are wet. Also, I will not pick up your snotty
tissues, they are horrible. The truth is, you can see in to the future,
a future where your housemate lives forever and the tissues
are just the beginning – soon, my God, they have pissed in a baking
tray, they save lung fudge in a clamp jar, they dress up as you
and fuck – this must end with my wet socks. You have forgotten

that your housemates will die, pneumonia perhaps, those lungs,
and you will pat your pockets at the funeral, wishing you’d kept
the tissues, and your dead housemate’s bad habits will form the meat
of a good-natured speech and how, if only you’d known the tissues

were a sign, not a habit, that their lungs might collapse and the sunlight
they spread all through their life, the phlegm, remains with you still.