Bonedog
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 will even think
of the oppressive barometric
pressure back
where you have just come
from with fondness
because everything is worse
once you're home.
You will 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 homestyle
silences and clouds
contribute to nothing
but the general
malaise. The clouds,
such as they are,
are in fact suspect
and made from a different
material than those
you left behind.
You yourself are 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
moonlanded, 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
as 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, big
blue whale, a
skeletal darkness;
you've 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.
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