Where I call Home (Poem)

Carrying bags around, in my car or the lockers at the gym,

Bundles of burdens threatening to break my back,

Couldn’t sleep in the parking lot with gangsters trashing bins,

Wrapping myself in blankets to save what warmth I had.

Like a turtle carrying its shell wherever it goes,

My home no longer consisted of place,

Until in a hospital I figured it out, that home can change depending on myself.

H is for heart, for your home may be where your heart is,

O is for origin, determining our ancestral home and ethnicity,

M is for mind, where our brains tell us what we believe is home,

E is for eternity, that home is where we spend most of our time.

So perhaps living out in the streets taught me something important,

To strive for a place where I belong,

And to realize no home on earth is permanent,

That nothing in the earth is forever set in stone.