Definitions of Home: Part 4, “A Train”

Home isn’t a place or a person.

Home is an attitude.

Lying on the soft tiny bed in this train,

I realize that I’m not rushing to go anywhere.

I have what I need right here,

And it isn’t much better anywhere else.

I have peace of mind, comfort, and I have music if i need it.

Sure my relatives miss me sometimes and there are people who want to see me.

There are things for me to do somewhere.

But that’s all in the past and future.

Not on this train.

Here I am with myself,

And as long as I am with myself anywhere,

Anywhere can be home.

Any discomfort and uncertainty can be an adventure.

I don’t have to be afraid, as here I am just as safe and loved as anywhere else.

The world hasn’t stop spinning,

I am very much grinning.

I am on the train.

I am also home.

“Am I a storm to be quieted?”

Am I a storm to be quieted?
No, some of us need to scream.

I, I let you tape my mouth,
To prevent offense,
That came so easy with your prejudices.
Even after, I peeled it off,
For time I could not understand,
The new power I had gained.

Inch by inch,
I crawled back up to high ground
And found my voice again.
Here it echoes in the distance.
Though I wish you’d hear it,
It makes me content
That I’m doing something
You’d never understand.

(unpublished archive June 2015)

caring

I’ve tried to get rid of you,
A few times now.
You’re not who I expected to be with.
You’re not the whirlwind romance or the ken doll I had in mind.
I keep pushing you away because you don’t fit their description.
You’re nice, and make me feel calm,
And you make me someone else,
I haven’t met her before.

No, I don’t protest,
But I still hold on to my expectations,
And they make me sick,
Even though perhaps I’ve gotten,
Much better than what I thought I wished.

And still I’m so scared.
If you’re different, how do I know who you are?
If you leave, I’ll blame myself for my decision,
And what will I tell my scars?

I really don’t understand how you ended up in my life.
So I keep thinking you should leave.
But every time I think it,
I pull you close,
One more kiss,
Cherishing you,
While you’re oblivious to my motive.
Oh please please don’t leave.
Maybe I’m just scared that I care.
And that it’s better to be the one to step away
Than to be left standing there.
And even worse, by a person who didn’t fit your scheme.

Love is way too fucking complicated,
And sometimes feels so overrated,
But you waking up next to me
Is what keeps me from over-thinking
Everything else to its extremes.
I guess you just end up being
The collateral damage to my mind machine.

I pray for clarity,
But it’s never there,
Except in loneliness,
And that I refuse to bear.
Clarity is in quitting,
In cutting people off,
In cleaning away dishes,
In choosing a very practical career,
In cutting off your dreams.
The great struggles of life,
They have no room for such a thing,
But they cause everything else,
The stuff worth waking up for.

Because walking away is easier than caring.
And caring is a violent storm,
But there you see all love and art,
And feeling of a beating heart.

(from the unpublished archive 2015)

thinking

There’s a party going on in the room next door,

So  I’m here listening to jazz,

Typing to the beat of the music,

Trying to get through the night,

Without going insane with the noise of humans that follows me.

I’m always in a filled room

A loud hallway.

But they don’t really know I’m there.

Sometimes I wonder if it could have been different.

Why aren’t I the one making the indescribable noise.

Maybe because even after two invitations,

I still didn’t think the invitations were honest.

I chose instead to light candles and do sweet nothing –

Thinking.

Uncertainty

Avoidance of any concept past today,

As today’s burdens are intoxicating enough to process.

No matter what I finish,

There will always be something left undone,

Some reason I am not perfect.

Some reason why I cannot live fully yet,

And by live fully I mean breathe without holding my breath

For what is coming.

It is not a good feeling,

To keep sustaining it for years.

I keep thinking, one more year, and I will know.

I will be safe from the uncertainty that haunts me.

And every year,

Things so change,

That I step further from the coast into the ocean.

Crowding in America

Everything here is so crowded with options and abundance, it seems to make the air thicker and harder to breathe. One has no trouble breathing on an empty meadow high up in the mountains. Here my three blankets are pilled up like mattresses, like the clothes in the corner, which I hardly wear, like the books on the shelf, all four of them just started, like all the objects and colors on the wall, like the electronics, four types of screens lined up on the desk.

My head screams. I imagine a room like that of a cell or a monastery, empty beyond a single bed. Empty so there’s room for my thoughts to enter it too.

Lying on the symbols of comfort, surrounded by bright and colorful lights, flowers, words, and decor, shoppes with my every undiscovered want, times a thousand. Choice, choice, and more choice. I become so distracted that it takes driving on the same old gray road that I’ve been driving every day for two years (if I manage to convince myself to turn off the radio), to be truly alone. Thoughts flow while I try not to crash, but a quietness permeates the air like nowhere else in the cities of the country, as I have no choice then but to hear my naked thoughts.

But the ride ends so soon, and I walk into places screaming, More! More! Think this! More TV! Eat! But what? Oh the time it takes to decide.

I watched a man say recently, how America never developed its own kitchen, as around the world all great cooking has been born out of limited options, and making the best of those possibilities. Although grateful tor the obvious, my mind starves for the limitations, like being stuck with a sheet of blank paper in a boring class, that enable me to truly be.
Free.

Non-Poetic Rant from the Armchair: “Not Saving the World”

It’s hard for me to figure out what I want to do with my life because
I want to participate in normality
And that tends to encompass the majority of things
I don’t want to fight for:
Grades and jobs that entail
Bending over backwards to show people my worth.
I don’t want to be under-worked and underpaid and underestimated because of my age.
I want to be respected as a human, with ideas.
That seems like decades from now, possibly.
But what ridiculous thing can I do if I choose to run against the system?
It all amounts to shame.

What if I don’t want to solve the world’s problems?
What if I just want to be, because everything is essentially meaningless anyway,
Except for the joy of people, and even that’s temporary to their existence.
Saving the world is such a reckless idea.
Who said the world needs to be saved?
What said it can be?