Coming Home

Coming home is terrible

Whether you have someone to speak or not;

Whether you have a husband

Or a husband-shaped loneliness waiting for you

Coming home is terribly lonely

So that you think

Of the oppressive pressure 

Back where you have just come from

With fondness;

Because everything's worse 

Once you are home 

You think of the wind 

Clinging to the grass stalks,

Long hours on the road,

The roadside assistance and ice creams,

And the peculiar shapes 

Of certain clouds and silences 

Longing because you did not want to return 

Coming home is

Just awful.

And the home-style silences and clouds contribute to nothing

But the general discomfort

Clouds, such as they are,

Are in fact suspect

And made from different material 

Than those, you leave behind.

You are yourself cut 

From a cloudy material,

Returned, 

Remaindered,

Ill-met by moonlight,

Unhappy to be back,

Hurt in the wrong spots,

Suits of dish-rag 

Ratty, worn

You return home and 

The Earth's gravitational pull

Efforts now redoubled

Dragging your shoelaces loose 

And your shoulders leaning

Backwards, deepening

To the worry on 

Your forehead

You return home deepened,

A string attached to tomorrow

By a hollow strand of...

Anyway...

You sigh at the identical days

One might as well, at a time

Well...

Anyway...

You're back

The sun goes up and down

Like a tired sloth

The weather immobile

Like a broken limb

While you keep getting older

Nothing moves but 

The shifting tides of salts in your body

Your vision blurs,

You carry the weather with you,

Like a skeletal darkness.