homecoming

everything soft and blurred, inside of an old digicam. through an inverted lens and from very far away i am the voyeur. summers are mine to be free but i had no home to return to. the mangoes aren’t quite as ripe, and the coffee tastes too bitter. years have passed since i left the small town, but it finds its ways to have me back. it keeps its children wrapped inside its lines, and sometimes these lines are bound where my larynx is. my voice expands in itself till it explodes. i took the first train out, and laughed leaving it. the train lead to where there i learnt to breathe slowly and i could dance again. i watched love find itself in every stranger living a different life, and i stole each life one by one. there was nothing i couldn’t be and there was nothing i’d stop being. you can float on water and you can warn me precious, but i am blind in my freedom and in my rose-glasses, everything is beautiful— even you.

to have no home is to be a guest, and you overstay your welcome and then the city is pushing at you, but the hometown extends its lines and there is an old itch you haven’t felt in long. to be neither there nor here, i am floating across time and space. to what address should i ask you to write to me? would you care to remember, i like to be a phantom. change, and i am someone else. right now, i am me and you are you and there is be a time again like this. i am the me you knew and you will always be lovely, but the hourglass turns and so do i.

i leave no road untaken, i hop across, thus i am the wanderer who is lost. i wish almost to find nothing linear so i can be lost as long as i like, wandering to where the tide takes. i listen to waves that crash against rocks, recede back home. always back home, to the ocean and its siren’s call. everything leads back there, in unknown depths and drowned endings. i am my mother’s child and i cry in her soft arms and it is the only time shame dredges up my chest, my homecoming, inside with bloody feet. my homecoming, because there is no where else to go.