Home

You will run away from home. On a Wednesday night when the rain is falling like it's at war with the earth, at 1:07 a.m., you'll burst through your front door and onto the road in search of some oxygen. Wind whipping skin, skin drenched in cold, tears hiding between the rain, you will keep running away. Their screams will still echo inside your head, rolling from side to side, banging on the walls, begging to be let out. Thunder splitting though the clouds, echoing through your thoughts, how do you shake them off? Fists meeting faces, faces falling of their faith, you are so far from God.

You keep going. Rain following your footsteps, cars passing by, a dog in the distance, wondering why. Why are you here? In your body, in your blue, in your break. There's this one moment, when you're running, when your breath is playing hide and seek with your lungs, when your muscles are bowing to your mind, when your tears blur your sight, your lids- windshield wipers for your eyes, you're going so fast, feet to soil, soil to space, sole to soil, soul to space. For that one shimmer of a second, that one slice, you believe that you can do it. That you can get away. That the chains were only there because you were holding onto them. So, you believe. You push, you pedal, you fly..

and you fall. Because you don't have wings. You don't run away from home. Home is here, in the poem you're writing, in the holes you're hiding, in the thud thud thud helicopter hum in your chest, the lag in your breath, this version of yourself. Home is the girl in your head, the way her smile butterflies your spine, the way her voice shudders down your sides, the way she is. Home is these feelings, these faults, these thoughts, these rhythms in your wrists, these writings in your ribs. Home is these 1 a.m. nights when not a single star in the sky has enough light to guide you here. Home is where you've always been. It's not the screams or the slaps. Not the blue or the break. It's right here, inside of you, despite of you. You can't run away. But you'll try. And on Wednesday night when the clouds are shattering against the earth, you'll shatter too. Into a million pieces of a home that was always, always, a part of you.

Reviews

[Piro]

I love the second person narrative and the intensity of the poem over all. The line that starts 'you're going so fast, feet to soil...' is so wonderful, how it evolves.

[kdbryant]

Thank you very much!