Going home
is a series of discarded photos.
A movie, a montage of moving faces
crammed into different phases,
blurred on the fogged up window spaces,
all stoplight swirls of people on autopilot
in the horror of passing through half-alive.
The wage slaves with blinders
spray over the myriad details.
Perhaps the only way to avoid this fate,
the only true discipline
,
is to stop for a moment the spinning carousel,
and apprehend the tiny miracle
shot through with words and coming out the other side
where faceless entities reside,
to read and comment and connect this ritual
of fleeting interpretation
to the actual substance of our connection.
When transcripts from the underground
is this beautiful mist landing on the sound
of my fingers pressed between pages.
The film merges with the car alarm,
connected to the wind that moves the curtain
to charm the leaves into heightened heaves of breath
from hidden recesses.
Awake again, as if Lazarus from out of sickness,
I can finally smell the tangerine peels from Chinatown markets,
I feel the bliss of one man’s lit cigarette
as it hangs out of an open window
to bear witness to the street scenes
packed into the periphery of dreams.
There’s the teary airport discovery
that no one knows when the next time they’ll share company,
that time together is a slippery slope,
a shifting season in woodsmoke,
a chalk drawing the rain would soak
and wash away
with the sound of TV static.
Under many years of cover,
certain circumstances bring these memories to light.
Surfacing at last behind the blast of an engine,
an explosion, a flag at half mast
for the unknown victims of your exploration.
A textured recollection, a fragment thrown
into the haphazard puzzle of going home.
A scent, a street, a body of water,
all that you’ve ever known,
pieced together, a form returning
to the puzzle of going home.
yakskinpocketnotes 