Home

It was in the darkness that I first glimpsed your face:
                 I didn't recognize you, couldn't recognize you
                            only focused on my condition.

I didn't equate the darkness with the light of dawn,
                 The evening star was not the morning star
                           at that point in my journey.

I was lost, untethered, and couldn't see the stars for what they were:
                  fixed points to guide ships.


                            The idea of a fixed point brought venom to my mind, as if
              the very notion of a pole star was incompatible
with the freedom of the untethered ship.

I saw their light - this I cannot deny, but
               I didn't know what to do with it,
                        It was just a fact, like another pile of socks on the bathroom floor.

Could the dawn and the blackness of night, clouds on velvet sky, be one?

Peering into the abyss, digging deeper into the darkness,
              one day it all collapsed in blindness,
                    wandering like a fool without comprehension,
                            without words, without coherent thought, stumbling, stumbling. . .

Running away, like a boy escaping a ribbon tacked to his pants,
              You were tacked to my heart but I rejected you, fled you.

The monster is the sun.

There is identity:

The King orders his own Execution.

No one can understand because it passes all understanding, paradox,
                   broken bits of glass all gleaming, gleaming from the same light.

To escape, to go away, to descend, to see and experience the worthlessness of all things,
                   betrayal, humiliation, destruction, thousands of times, over and over

With your face pressed against the glass and yet simultaneously with the pain,
            the lacerations, the blood, the tears all running down like rain on that cold spring morning.

Till nothing but bone remains, to bleach white in the sun and decompose on a forest floor
            till winter hides the scene and spring blossoms into forgetfulness and merriment.

A merry world but hollow and bored, hollow and bored to the bones where wisdom is cliche
             and becomes indistinguishable from toothpaste slogans.

But you are here too, most invisibly, clinging like glass to a window pane.
             I can't see you but only through you, aching with the absence, hidden presence.

When did the stars become fixed?  How did the ship find its course finally,
           steered ever so ineptly by one who once dreamed of becoming a captain (at a very young age).

There seems to be more rocks on the coastline, and more storms at sea to make it impossible
          that this small ship can ever return to port, to go home, to return to the heart
                      that was lost and broken by blows and bitter tears and
                                 taunting voices that still echo down deserted corridors.

Can it be that in going home, one is already, mysteriously, home in some fashion already?

The boat is put in its course and it is home, and if only the captain thinks of home with his entire
              lonely heart, then the blood will pump and the hand will remain steady through the night.

To die on the return journey is to know, truly, the City in which you belong.