The House I'll Soon Give Up

The poem seeks to upset conventional common sense about the desirability of property ownership. The root word "property'' echoes not only of possession but also deprivation and appropriation, and a mortgage is literally a death-pledge. Not owning a house, if you can, or not wanting to, if you can't, is seen as madness and irrationality. Yet, defying this economic logic can be a way of affirming the temporariness of life and the strangeness of marking space through capital. Having never lived in dwellings that I "owned,'' I still "own'' those dwellings through the deeper ownership authored by the memory of experiences there. Another context of the poem is the British obsession with "housing market'' viewed with an outsider's eyes. "Market'' is presented as an abstract article of faith. In an economic boom, people are constantly tutored on TV how to climb the property ladder by whatever means, and now, in a recession, before government plans to help those losing their homes were finalized, house prices started rising again to the delight of the property owners.