Home

Home. It’s where the threat of departure from perfection keeps us safe and warm. Where an iron-fisted silent dictator once sat and now mellows now that his countrymen have fled.

Home, above all, home, where no one needs to return yet we all cannot forget.

Who are you, home? Where were you when I needed you, home? Left for … nothing … the house down the street, where you could walk in or out but never be there.

Silent in the upper room, hiding from imperfections that could cause you to stand out. The nail that stands up gets hammered. Can’t go back, home. Home, where nothing existed, forcing me to create worlds that seemed to exist, but were only really in my head. Home, where this ability was birthed, stunted, died … til later, when rebirthed.

It wasn’t a home … it was a house … it was a dwelling … in was an encasement, holding in anger, resentment, feelings of abandonment. It gave birth to motion – travel – desire – evolution, revolution (same thing). It moved my fingers all while my brain stood still, living on borrowed time, my body about to burst from the inside while my energy is about to run out.

Home, where I can’t go back because time moves forward and “fixed” is only figment and not fact. Home, which I know nothing about, because a home is where the heart is and I have no heart, no heart to go back to, no heart there, no heart, no home, no love, no family, just me, trying to find my way on my own.

Alone. All by myself, home alone, left alone, alone to navigate, steering wheel in hands with no driving lessons, hardly a key, legs not long enough to reach the gas pedal. Stunted, still a prisoner of my own protection, still angry, still not willing to accept my own responsibility to fix it. Still want to be taken care of, for this to be someone else’s fault. Yes, home, it’s your fault, as I remember, it was you that stood over me and pressed the play button, starting this whole nightmare off.

Home, I hate you. I hate home. What were you watching?

Blame home, where the surface is so much more satisfying, silent screams so much easier to ignore, stifle. As long as it’s okay up top, all is okay. Oh, home, you’re still so transparent, a mirage on the highway that I roll past during every drive I take.

So sick of this melodramatic bullshit, not need for this window pain anymore – it was so college, so post-adolescent depressive, so prozac nation, so Elizabeth Wurtzel, so far from home, so new then and so played out now.

So left alone – so torn. It doesn’t matter anymore whose fault it was, it just was, and now it is and now it’s you and now it’s time for you to make a home, and homes do not have just one or two people in them.

Homes have families. Homes have reality. Homes have hurt, then forgiveness, then love, then hurt, then forgiveness, then healing. Home can have me. And you, and you, and you, and you. And stop kicking them out. Stop being so afraid. Stop. Stop trying to run. Run away. Stop. Stand still, arrest yourself. Stay still in your own place. Stand still in your home.

It's an aphrodisiac ...

All a writer has to do to get a woman is to say he's a writer. It's an aphrodisiac."

- Saul Bellow, author of Herzog and Humboldt's Gift

Prisoners of Our Own Protections

We are Prisoners of our own Protections
trapped by fears of former lives

We try to paint our lives in broad strokes
when instead its pointillism our pictures need
one dot upon another
our puzzled peace of mind is laid

Today is not in 20 years
today is not tomorrow
today is only today

20 years does not come in one day
yet one day can come in 20 years.