Home

The moon was blasting me with its blue wash and the sun hadn’t even dipped behind the west hills yet, and I realized that I was just going home and home was someone else’s home and no matter what kind of posters and pictures I put up this was not my home and I never have had my own home and I don’t know what home feels like.

Sometimes home is in the back of the bus and watching all the people get on and trying to see if the next person to step to show the driver a transfer will be an attractive girl and I hope that if she gets on she will have no other choice but to sit next me and maybe two stops later our knees will touch and she’ll look over at me and check me out and she’ll start a conversation and we’ll get off at the same stop and we’ll get coffee and start talking about the dark sad past and see the stars fall and crush Washington to pieces. Sometimes home is at dawn and for some reason I haven’t gone to bed and I walk to a coffee shop in the morning and the chill of dawn bites my skin and pinches the top of my head and I can see my breath and the world is so quiet and the birds aren’t even out to ruin the silence with their annoying chirps and whistles, but I don’t hate birds, they just have to keep quiet till the sun is all the way above the Cascades and the clouds aren’t an orange purple tint anymore and most of the stars get washed out blue.

Portland has always been home, but it feels like She wants me to move out but is too nice to tell me that She isn’t into me anymore and I have some kind of false hope that is not based on any past experience that things will get better, but Portland keeps redecorating and I see the pictures She puts up on the walls and the new carpet and the old vintage furniture got sold and has been replaced with that modern shit from Ikea that I had to put together while She just watches me and texts with friends, and Portland is hoping that I’ll break up with Her while I keep waiting for Her to break up with me.

Home is a cup of coffee, cigarettes and no one trying to set me straight on how the truth is out there and I shouldn’t fall for what the news is telling me – its more than that! Chemtrails, truthers, Obama socialism, this fucked up event is covering up that event and sheeple and fluoride, distilled there and bottled here, dub step & how I am jazz inspired shadow government, white privilege versus a fake lake under black helicopter skies – rhodenderons grow here and also over there.

Home is never where I am now, but where I was when I didn’t want to be there in the first place. I can’t fall anymore. I love too easily, but I don’t think I ever loved before, but what do I know, maybe love isn’t real at all and its just to make me carry on the human race, but if I fathered a baby and someone wanted to have a baby with me wouldn’t that make the baby a fucked up baby? I don’t really do science.

I keep home on my mind because I have never had one, but I have had thousands of camps, maybe I’m a nomad with a range of ten miles.

Spring has always reminded me that Portland used to explode in greens and the multi-colors of roses and how much She teases me with cricket star filled nights along the cold dead Willamette. I swam in the Willamette and I know her sins and her secrets and how much she is jealous of the mighty Columbia. She has no idea how much of a poser the Columbia is. Go ahead, get that boat over that sandbar, but you will never make it far enough to find the East.

I have all but given up on a home with a breakfast nook, a study with books piled high to the ceiling and a desk of oak and an old leather chair where I read the words that I had ignored for far too long and a pipe in my mouth because I think tobacco has made a home with me and I never meant to be permanent and a basement full of paint and guitars and a letterpress and a craft desk and tools and potting soil and all the things that make a home a home, but I don’t think I’ll ever find home whether it’s a house or a place of complete comfort and that feeling of belonging because I never was meant to be here or belong to anything or anyone and I don’t mean that with any kind of sadness or resentment but as a statement.

Home is on the tip of my tongue after having sex and after a night of fun with the fellas. I don’t think anyone thinks of me as home and if they do, I think they are making a grave mistake because a home should never lose all power in the middle of the night while they are sleeping and wishing I could slip out and run away. That’s the only time when I want to go home to where I live is being somewhere else watching some girl sleep trying to understand the feelings I’m not feeling or the feelings I’m feeling but shouldn’t.

I remember walking around the Overlook neighborhood and I looked into this house and saw a guy sitting at a desk writing or drawing, I couldn’t tell which, and he was about my age and wearing horned rim glasses and a white short sleeve button up shirt and this woman who I imagine was his wife was wearing a green vintage dress that hugged her waist and she was swaying her hips and dancing in circles and her eyes were closed in ecstasy and I could hear jazz through the house walls and their garden had primroses and forget-me-nots and I got so sad because that was something I think I want and I probably never have because I’m not able to.

I have these ghosts that follow me wherever I go and I see them hover around me and rains when its sunny and I freeze when everyone else is hot and I look into the eyes of others and I don’t see bottomless wells where there is no water and not end and I wonder if I could ever paint again. I do remember my dreams and sometimes I say I forget because they are so horrible and so painful I don’t really want to explain them to anyone when they ask about what I dreamt about. Sometimes when I first stand up in the morning I feel like I’m falling thousands of feet towards an earth that does not welcome me into any kind of bosom – and I do love me a nice bosom. Sometimes I wonder if ghosts are haunted by older ghosts, but these are things I could think about later tonight when the moon hides its wide eyed stare and steely sheen that crosses my hands as they massage my knees while I keep staring at the window that has my reflection in it and I’m not sure if I’ve ever seen a face as old as the one I see stare back at me. I’m tired, but I can’t sleep and if I did sleep I would wake up to all my ghosts staring at me and silently telling me I should be a ghost like them and not still enjoying Greek yogurt, menthols, indie-folk, crying at beautiful churches and getting a triple. I am not dead yet and I’m sure I have one more miracle in me before that can transpire.

I’ll never forget the foggy coast in the North where the world ended and the birds were giddy with excitement that I might get into that boat and drift out into the North Pacific and never see land again and they tried to talk me into getting into the wet mossy row boat and cast off into the grey and black surf and dash myself on the rocks and maybe just drift into the middle and watch the foam get swatted off the end of the waves like blowing off the head on a beer and looking to find a sea turtle and jumping out of the boat and letting the turtle carry me deep into the ocean’s gut and have the turtle take me home that I never knew I had and we would drift and watch the orcas swim above us looking for prey and the kraken below us keeping its alien eye on us and respecting the hierarchy between the orca, us and her and the sun. I’ll never know the sun like the rest of you do.