Coming home is terrible
Whether the dogs lick your face or not
Whether you have a wife,
Or just a wife shaped loneliness waiting for you
Coming home is terribly lonely
So that you think
Of the oppressive barometric pressure,
Back where you have just come from,
With fondness
Because everything's worse
Once you're home.
You think of the vermin,
Clinging to the grass stalks,
Long hours on the road,
Roadside assistance and ice-creams
And the peculiar shapes
Of certain clouds and silences
With longing because you did not want to return
Coming home is
Just awful
And the home-style silences and clouds
Contribute to nothing
But the general malaise.
Clouds, such as they are,
Are in fact suspect
And are made from a different material
Than those you left behind.
You yourself were cut
From a different cloudy cloth
Returned,
Remaindered,
Ill-met by moonlight,
Unhappy to be back,
Slack in all the wrong spots,
Seamy suit of clothes
Dishrag-ratty, worn.
You return home
Moon-landed, foreign;
The Earth's gravitational pull
An effort now redoubled,
Dragging your shoelaces loose
And your shoulders
Etching deeper the stanza
Of worry on your forehead.
You return home deepened,
A parched well linked to tomorrow
By a frail strand of...
Anyway.
You sigh into the onslaught of identical days.
One might as well, at a time...
Well.
Anyway.
You're back.
The sun goes up and down
Like a tired whore,
The weather immobile
Like a broken limb
While you just keep getting older.
Nothing moves
But the shifting tides of salt in your body.
Your vision blears.
You carry your weather with you,
The big blue whale,
A skeletal darkness.
You come back,
With X-ray vision.
Your eyes have become a hunger.
You come home with your mutant gifts
To a house of bone.
Everything you see now,
All of it:
Bone.
