Home?

Home to me is four walls of dysfunction.

Elephants filled in each room at family functions.

Skeletons in the closet, secrets left unspoken.

Home is the reason my heart is broken, cracked open with traumatic memories.

You can hear their haunting whisperings through the rumbling of leaves, fallen from a family tree rooted in generational trauma.

Drama travels through cracked windows.

Arguments crescendo, and a body's being carried out in a stretched limbo to a funeral home.

I guess that's the way home goes.

Home is a place of repeated cycles, pictures on the wall of archangel Michael and a bible preaching about a hell that exists within the walls of prison cells.

There's a man that can't come home because the folks at the police station made him admit to crime he didn't commit.

And now I can't breathe, these four walls are closing in because I'm carrying the burden of my forefathers' sins.

They were trying to survive in a world of mass genocide, freedom rides and Jim Crows that stalked you on every block.

Jim Crows replaced by police cars and cops, and better watch the way you talk or else you'll end being an outline on a sidewalk.

Laid out flat, blood coloring outside of the lines of chalk.

That blood was supposed to be thicker than water.

We were taught to stick together because all we got is us, because what happens outside this home is too rough.

But it isn't safe here, because in here is a reflection of out there.

Home is the reason my heart is broken, cracked open with traumatic memories.

You can hear their haunting whisperings through the rumbling of leaves, fallen from a family tree rooted in generational trauma.

There is no end.

So, it doesn't matter if I finish this poem with a period, or a comma.