To my home
Home is an entity
Of everchanging madness
With long, weighted wings
Flying through the mountains
The canyons
The gardens
Of my soul;
Curves of shadowed architecture
Bending and forming the walls
And little light:
The overhead kitchen light
The quiet luminescence of the porch
The living room TV, blaring unusual technicolor
I’ve buried myself in it’s chest
And it’s wrapped his long tendrils around mine–
Such an odd, beautiful heat
That kept me safe, buried, intertwined
But I hear noises sometimes,
When I sleep
When I wake
A shuddering
A breathing
As if our home is right in the center of a volcano
On the precipice of
explosion
He is rarely elegant, like the little swans he barrels over
And very still, he rarely moves
But when he flys,
When he flys,
It shakes the whole world.
Bearing a new world:
A world full of shadows
and ironic clearness
Of the people, the entities, I live with inside
Sister
To my sister
I feel uneasy
When I think of that pond
In the corner of my mind;
It sits ominously,
And something
Just beneath the surface
Moves
I’ve never seen it; I thought I had
My memory was never good:
But I remember her, distantly in a field
And she was beautiful
And she had light
So silent,
So comforting
I’d like to think that pond took her–
Took her it did
Within it’s little, mossy hands
And melted her
And sucked her into that water
Of dreaded evilness
She was perfect
And that pond was not
And they could not be the same
Right?
I took me a long time to remember
How I’d really seen her:
Between waves of heat
Conjured up by–
It could be possible
Sure that
That maybe she was never there.
And this delusion that she was
Was the same delusion that made me think
The pond was never there either
It was never murky
And my sister, my love,
Was never beautifully malicious
In that world of shadows I finally saw her clearly
And in that pond sits a child
And above that child sits a human
And neither of them have any idea who they are
My Father
To my father; To everything that changes
My Father
Lies nowhere special
In my mind
He’s barely subtle,
Except for his presence
In the wind, the sun, the chill
There was a time where
I wanted him to be megalithic
So I erected a structure in his name
But
As the seasons changed,
I could only watch him, who he was, crumble
For reasons I was unsure
Now that I’m older,
When I try to realize him now
I think of everything that shifts and changes;
The seasons, my bed sheets, the turning of the sun, the tide of the ocean
And yet he feels as indispensable
As my soul
He was never absent–that is what he dreaded, so he is not–
But he was never there, not fully,
always changing between who he was and who he hated that he was
But I do not think I could of ever expected him to be, to be there
When I see him
I watch him
Drowning
His arms, like currents of wind
His cries, muffled against snow
His half-genuine smiles, ever fleeting like the sun
His hugs, like the coming of spring
Are all him, all one, trying to escape
From this pool he’s created;
A scary amalgamation of all his dreams and fears
Like sponges
Soaking up the alcohol he pairs them with
And the smoke his coats them with
I used to get months of him, of that good him
But now I only get days
And every other day is a transition
To another him
To another time
And
Honestly
I don’t think he is truly happy anymore;
And that realization
Is what makes my world a mess
A horrible mess
In this storm
So I hide
And watch
From the mouth of a cave
As he rages and rages and rages on
Mother my garden
To my mother
It was a storm
Just like this one
When she came;
Through the howling
And screaming
of the trees
She appeared
Naked
Trudging
Through the muddy earth
Clenching in her fists
Little seeds
I told them of you
Of how you got on your knees
In the midst of a storm,
Plunged your hand
Into my garden,
And planted them
And how I didn’t even know why
I left my little cottage,
My little cave
To see
And there
With the rain falling on us
You taught me how:
Your hands guiding mine,
Over small, green tips
And taught me how to plant my own;
But I never spoke of how the seeds were grown
Oh, mother
I could only speak of you
“She mothered my garden,” I told them
She made it beautiful
She even wanted to teach me how
To make it beautiful on my own
I cannot bear to tell them
Of when you left;
Or before that
When I realized you did not come
To stay here permanently
But you came
In order to learn
How to leave;
When you went away
To other peoples gardens
And left
And left little old me
And I cried for you
For many days
And I was angered by you
For many more
But in the end I always cried
Cried and said
Mother, my garden
Mother, my garden
Where did you go?
I remember
In my solemn
Bringing my hands up to my eyes
To wipe my tears
And I looked at my palms
And I saw
Mother, I saw you staring back at me.