You can tell the rolls of dust under the bed are ghosts
because their bodies are see-through
but they have their own mind 

their own fierce, unpredictable, grey mind.
Your mind crouches inside your hard white head. 

Ghosts are actually souls. Ghosts, souls, dust—all the same. 
Your soul is a white satin cushion under your ribs.
Inky stains have spread into the weave.   

The dust-ghosts are dead but they're trapped on earth
—for some reason which will not be a good reason—
so they still have a mind. If you have a mind you have free will.  

You have free will. It's a wonderful gift which you can't see
but it makes you do everything wrong. 

When you're down on the yellow sparkly lino playing
and all the other things you do with your body 

you see the ghosts quivering under bed and watching.
The games, the children coming and going, 
the sleeps, the smacks. 

 They know everything about you, the things 
you've done and caused in that room in your four years.   

But one day—every day new things are revealed—
you realize that the ghosts don't like it when the mother 
savages them with the mop. 

The mother with her hair going grey like fine dust,
dyed with a kind of Vegemite only smelly in the bathroom 
in the afternoon.  

The mop handle flickers like an old Charlie Chaplin film.
Black and white and black and white scratching the air.  

They do not like it one bit.
The mother with her tight lips and her dirty yellow mop
and her muscly arms shaking with rage.

They scream away into the wind
and up and up into a sort of Heaven.