A Cosmic Bus

Home,

A tough ‘H’ to swallow,

A letter that lives in the mucousy depths of throats

propelling off chests like trampolines,

catapulting past tongues and teeth,

‘H’ is the sound of the wind being taken.

Then there’s Ome.

The all-encompassing essence of consciousness,

Plugging one’s ears it can be felt

rising like a raspberry pie from one’s lungs,

pungent like rum,

Om, the sound of the universe,

Om!

where the ‘O’ blows through you,

‘O’ born from the heart, nearly taking its shape

while manifesting vibrations like children flying down reliable slides,

Then comes Me.

What is sung into the mirror before the stage is hit,

when we is mixed up,

Me is you in disguise,

Me who gets dressed with the sun and doesn’t stop until home is reached,

Home,

With an ‘M’ resting under the pressure of mouths,

Like a page under a stamp or a clip in a grenade,

‘M’ is destruction at its smoothest,

It hums like the buzzing of the wasps

after brothers release baseballs at their comfort.

Last is ‘E’.

What is said while spiders join one in the steam,

Like a dog with a stepped on tail

‘E’ makes one show their yellow teeth,

Except for when its parked at home,

Fused by comrade ‘M’,

Comfortable not stable no

but a surrendering, an acceptance of constant change,

For at a time home smelt of rubber dribbling onto cement,

For at a time it was indigo on our foreheads and sticky on our chins,

It was the final bell and laughter and running shoes and tennis balls on the bottoms of chairs,

It was the passing of vegetables and time and felt like paper on our fingertips,

Cold sugary drinks, pepperonis, and digging toes into carpets,

Headaches and footballs and grass stains and prayers,

Blood on pavement, noses, and knees,

Chalk drawings of pound keys, Xs and Os

on driveways under cars,

Rummaging footsteps on stairs, doors shutting softly in the dark, cars rolling down driveways in neutral, new hats of baseball teams and hand-me-down shirts, scouting for dog poop in backyards in flip-flops,

The smell of mud.

And scat, catching frogs and letting them go, catching colds and green fevers,

Dad comes home with ginger ale in his pockets as Mom feeds you soda crackers on the couch and jabs your armpit,

The way they see you. The way they see themselves.

Home lives in the eyes of our parents and never leaves

even when we do,

And upon our returns the house is smaller, the TV fuzzier,

It crunches on our brains like an accordion,

We don’t want to stay too long,

No longer having the time to put tiles on a board, to roll dice,

The lasagna in our mouths is a layered reminder of the ice cream sitting on the porch watching the rain, the basketballs bouncing down the road in bare feet, the botched haircuts in picture frames on the piano,

Our parents forget our names.

Our children play with our old dollhouses

which we use to remember

what it was like, to remember the way crayons tasted,

The way midnight tasted from our beds,

Chlorine fumes ascending from pillows,

The teeth lost.

We forget the feeling of teeth growing in,

Our throats begin to fold like cardboard boxes in the attic,

We forget ourselves behind

the closets where monsters dwelled,

The gates that held out the forests

we explored with dogs glued to our hips chasing neighbourhood squirrels while we wandered

asking flowers permission to be picked before we picked them,

While wandering was still allowed,

Our eyes sauntered through classrooms landing on hopes who went home at the end of each day,

And we’d fantasize about being with them,

Living with them, building homes,

And still we fantasize

but now of simple times of letter grades and putting gum under desks instead of in napkins,

Of uniforms, and crustless bites, of saliva filling the metal gaps of our dental nightmares,

Of candy apples, carnival clowns, candy canes and Santa,

Oh delicious Santa.

We forget how to exist in the holiest of poles,

Forget how to kiss the sweetmeat clouds,

Whose cotton we now cough on,

We trap ourselves in basements of quickly filling sand

Having lost the thrill of being chased by demon’s chilly hands,

Choosing to live through the optics of our children,

Cry when they cry,

Stealing slivers of their amber souls,

Never having realized

The walls of home consist of skin,

Its windows are blue, brown, and green,

For home is a cosmic bus,

and it’s not going anywhere.