MOVING OUT
There are some homes
you can never leave.
Their grass will always be greener.
You walk on floors
connected
to the center of the earth.
The water from their taps
come from the spring
of your deepest dreams.
The trees have grown beside you,
and you know you would
never cut them down.
Is it my imagination, or are those palms
drooping lower? Edges of shrubs starting
to brown? Is this the way yards mourn?
Some houses you can never leave.
You move the furniture out
but the pieces remain, invisible.
and now your footsteps
patter
across rugless expanses
Butterflies fly in and out,
oblivious.
They don’t live here anyway.
The patio, empty of furniture,
is a striped shadow of minutes
ticking away.
Draw the curtains over unmet dreams:
that book you never got
to write,
the lover who was once
in your bed
who never came back.
The house holds your orgasms
as they echos through empty rooms
looking for you.
Some houses you can never leave.
They come back to taunt you as you
look for a new house,
lovely and pale, but most inferior
with too much dust,
creaking and reeking of the past owners.
They are pale, mere shadows
of the real arches and posts
that drove your life home,
as you bustled in and out
without ever thinking
you would leave.
You almost wish you had burned it down
that time you charred beans
filled it with smoke,
and now you are alarmed
with every ounce of longing
as you close the door behind you.
You do not see but it is breaking,
ready to follow you
with wood and beams clattering in a parade
like cheerleaders urging you to find
new land
and a steady spot.
You swing open the gate
but you too start
to break.
No wonder, the new owners
won’t feel at home.
Because your spirit has never left.
by JGrace
