Truly Outrageous

Home

Home is where you’re always wrong
but only in familiar ways. A crumpled
octopus kite, an opera without a song,
popsicle stick hovel. You might as well
dissuade a dog from drinking from a toilet
as try to stay there bent over some agitating
missing piece. Home is where you’re always
leaving, that’s its definition as the rabbit’s
is to be squirrelly and the apple’s green,
having seeds of arsenic, much symbolic use.
So the whole obligatory, migrating, anadromous
ball of wax seems to be knocking yourself out
to get back to where you felt you’d never get away,
that landlocked ditch-town bedlam
of flunky angels and tar-stuck dinosaurs,
the corner where you threw the stone
and winged the one you loved, the room
where you dried yourself, the roof
where the rocket crashed, those sentinel pines
recusing themselves. And when you do return
disguised as a giant decorated from foreign campaigns
in a rented convertible, home seems just another fake,
bloated real estate agents substituted
for fleet base-stealers, fagged-out
stroller-pushers for Nereids.
Somehow that only increases its value,
exposes home as a construct of reified
affection, quoth the critic, fabricated
by that master faker who never allowed
his name to be known until the end was neigh,
far from extradition, propped up by grandkids
for the flashbulbs, a happy interlude between
our gazette’s embezzlements and implants
slammed in car doors, our dumb and transparent
concessions to the strained, overheated oblivions
we’ve made of this world and all others,
the secret repercussions of some school-yard act
where we most revealed ourselves
as rotters to the core
then ran home to hide
where we never could.

-Dean Young