homecoming means waiting
for the snow to melt up on the backroads
so that I can lug these boxes
from the half-haunted parking lot up the hill
I’m too afraid to drive in the dark 

 homecoming means growing nervous
that every slight hiccup
is  doom, is some god’s way of saying
you weren’t supposed to actually come back
I am more nervous these days than I am excited,
more convinced
that i am  forever cursed to feel
like a misfire everywhere i live, I’m afraid
I must admit, about the overdraft fees in
my bank account and the miles put on
my car, and the room that i can’t carve
into a home and the creek rising enough
to swallow us whole 

 homecoming means being afraid
that home is never something we can
come back to, home is something we must feel
run up our spine when we sit alone
in bed  somewhere else,  
somewhere else is what I’m afraid of
there are always faces and people 
I love somewhere else, faces and people i could love if
i stayed and tried to fall into their hands 
there will always be a somewhere that i could be,
somewhere where if i tried,
I mean really tried, i could pin down life’s thread
to my walls and i wouldn’t have 

to roll it up messily with old hair ties and stuff it
into a moving box that i’m trying
to never need again 

 homecoming means saying I’ve been somewhere
else,
I tried to be someone
else 
I am always being and going and will never be
what I was before, and i will never be again
what I have come home to, home will never be
what I remembered but it will always be
me and i will always be more
and home will never forget the shape of everyone
who has gone 
but it will bend, and it will melt and it will toss
and turn and waller around
and pitch a fit until it fits
in every corner, fills up every glass,
crawls into your bed and makes you horny
and happy and lonely and tired and rested and ready 

homecoming means to be water,
to be evaporated from the source yet find
some way, somewhere
to condense, to piece yourself back together,
to fill up the creek bed until you spill over its edge
and you keep spilling,
to keep moving and bending and drowning
and pooling yourself into
whatever shape you must take until you reach
a place to rest
before evaporation starts all over again.