Wilderness House Literary Review 1/2


Youll Be A Collyer Brothers Hermit!1

Even then
my fingers were
stained with newspaper ink
gleaning information
for when I was
ready to speak.
And I thought
the more news
I consumed
I could fill
some unarticulated
gap
and prove
there was something
behind all that
fat.
The stacks accumulated
in my room
a garish, headlined
womb.
And when my father
evoked the brothers
at the side
of my bed
I retreated
under many covers
to bandage my
riotous head

Doug Holder











1 *Homer Lusk Collyer (November 1881­March 21, 1947) and Langley Collyer (October 1885­March 1947) were two
United States brothers who became famous because of their reclusiveness, filth and compulsive hoarding. For decades,
neighborhood rumors swirled around the rarelyseen, unemployed men and their home at 2078 Fifth Avenue (at the
corner of 128th Street), in Manhattan, where they obsessively collected newspapers, books, furniture, musical
instruments, and many other items, with boobytraps set up in corridors and doorways to protect against intruders.
The brothers are often cited as a paradigmatic example of compulsive hoarding associated with ObsessiveCompulsive
Disorder, or OCD, as well as disposophobia, or Collyer Brothers Syndrome, a fear of throwing anything away. They died
of malnutrition within a few days of each other, in the Harlem brownstone where they had lived as hermits, surrounded
by over one hundred tons of junk that they had amassed over several decades

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