What is home?
Is home the hearth? The welcoming touch?
Is home estrangement, silence?
Does home change? Move? Stay put?
What is home?
Is home that tight feeling in my chest? Or the birds released who fill the sky with breath?
Is home your eyes? Your smell? Your weight on me?
Can you leave home and return? Or does it stay, ephemeral and distant in evermore retreat?
Is home regret? Lost? Gone? Oblique?
Can I summon the feeling? Shape it? Form loss in movement, word, poem, tar, mud?

What is home?
Coming home, I do not know.
Perhaps it is your home now, not mine.
Have I ever existed? Been? Seen? Stood here on this concrete land? Or running my hands through forests, been lost in time?
I know many people have sat in this chair, looked out of this window, surveyed these streets, changing, up and down, inside out, vanished and found.
What is home? I found it in you, I lost it in me. I don’t know myself, I know too much, I am trapped, I am free.
Home no longer stands in building form. They took the trees out, they dug up the skeletons, the air changed and became heavy.

I no longer recognize the birds who make this sound, or their color, bright and vivid against the sag of turnpike and city fox.

I am the fox. I am the bird. I am the tree.

I am neither and all three.

What is home? You lend me keys, you take them back. We bury ourselves and dig ourselves up.

I never belonged, even then, even now, and where I come from, and where I am going.

Home is a stamp in time, unread letter, home is an idea. Home is nothing and something. Home is you. You are gone. I am here.

I remember and I forget. Home hurts. It feels deep and inky and imbedded.

If you drew home would it be in color? Monochrome?

Sometimes … I think I taste it. I dream it. I inhabit a moment.

And then. And then. And then. My heart breaks and reforms. And I am. I am … here and

gone.