Words that tumble from my tongue,
Trussed with uncontemporary time and
Rushed rhymes and opines on life.
Sacrosanct syllables
That spill and revolve and are still shrewdly evolving
When the Sonoran sky is spackled with starlight
And my eyes stumble shut.
Home is Jerome.
Where it’s in to be out and slowly knockabout
The uneven, art lined lanes,
Atop the membranes of old copper mines.
Where I slept in the little room
Near the English garden that John built,
After locking his Yorkshire, blue eyes with mine
As he died.
I didn’t know it then,
But nothing would feel like home again
For a long time.
Home is when indigo ether descends
And blends with the father of all things
Until he takes his slumber and
Uncle Al appears
To apprehend my fears
And play tricks
And sneak secrets
And throw so much more shade
Than I understood apparitions to be permitted.
Nat King Cole and Christmas trees
With painted ends and gaudy garland,
Communal, fresh games and
Flannel, matched pajamas.
Enchanted lists, precisely catalogued
To mitigate the sluggish wait
Preceding the appearance of Santa Claus
And the time when we could finally
Roll in our rewards and
Gorge on mom’s ravioli.
The only time of year
Anyone felt like me.
Home was the crunch of desert quartz
Beneath my small but mighty,
Blue-on-blue Nikes.
When my seven-year-old wingspan
Was bursting with cardboard
And black bags
And books and snacks
So that I could run away from home.
When I exhaled and regaled
Inside the deceptively protective
Crude and shabby shelter
I had assembled
Against the warm, black, jagged rocks
That kept out confusion
And the feeling that I was perpetually
In the wrong place
At the wrong time
On the wrong planet
And couldn’t understand
Where else I could go
That would make me feel that I belonged.
Home is unfolding on thick, brown carpet
Considering cover to back of garage sale vinyl,
Harmonizing until impeccable timing was achieved
And every measure breathed
And vibrated in unison with my heart and
Became sentient art
That moved through me.
When all but sound and words faded and
Life was the sensations and
Truth they created.
Home was when you penned songs
With notes like throngs
Of itinerant embraces
Holding out their hands for mine.
When you would put down the phone and spellbind
Your strings
And sing –
While I marveled.
When the clicking of your board
Tore me from boredom and drew me to the door
So that we could ascend our mountain and
Breathe in the creosote and
Consider God.
Home was the rumbling of life within my belly,
Sweet and tender already,
Soundlessly transmitting
That she had returned home and
By omniscient decree
Had named me
The bedrock of her being,
Her gestational vessel,
As she nestled
Pliably but with dominion into my womb.
Home was bearing bodily miracles by
Cuddling the cryptic creature to my breast
And sharing breath and heartbeats.
Being retained as a lattice of pacification
But knowing my station
When the time arrived that she could fly.
And she did –
With a conviction the likes of which I had been previously unacquainted.
Home was that tiny phenomenon,
Habitually uncertain,
Clinging to the safety of
Her pristinely preserved paperbacks
And my grasp.
Growing then, by twenty-five,
Into a woman far better than I.
Home is a lackadaisically liberated
Ellis Island manifest with
Pale, sprinkled ink and hand penned words
That read “occupation: composer”;
The day my ability to write
And hear tones
And influence vibration
Pronounced itself intelligently fated
And not at all indiscriminate.
The times I couldn’t make sense of the world
And what it meant to be sexy and
Why no one cared about other things.
Why they didn’t talk about life or Kierkegaard;
Why everyone was guarded and
No one wanted to be my friend.
And then.
I wrote.
And everything became again.
The times when the only words I could write were,
“I hate you.”
Home is the time I sat down to write a poem about words
That turned into a splurge of emotion
And missing
And wishing
That something
Would just feel like home again.
When I wished words were material matter
Which I could connect and construct
Like the trunk of a giant Sequoia that
I would wrap my arms around and never release
And made me think of my grandmother’s favorite song.
*please release me let me go*
When I sat at her bedside and used music to soothe her
Into the almighty, interdimensional, in-between
That oddly enough generally seemed
Like home to me;
Then watched her hurl past the event horizon,
Surging into the sizable kingdom
In which she was a magenta-colored goddess
With many arms and the trunk of an elephant.
When blurred tears and many years
Impeded my vision
As my old friends, words, returned;
Bubbling up so fast,
From a dimensional past,
Blasting out like stars with jazz hands holding sparklers
Before depositing me
In the places I needed to see
That hurt so much
I couldn’t.
When stanzas swayed my conscious mind
To stand down and allow
Rapid receipt of such clever proclamations as these;
Home is right now.
Words are eternal.
These verses are the vessels
Of your destiny.
Thank you. I see.