Home Poem (an update to an oldie)
Posted by Tracey Gilbert (Alumnus) | Filed under Poetry, Print
My hometown is a deficit full of shit and blood and pride.
Kids grow up cleaving to each other like mad-crazy lovers,
Leaving bruises, leaving scars that resemble the tributaries of the Mississippi.
We were beautiful, we were jaded, we wanted out, we made it painful.
I knew I was leaving.
The stagnation in that tiny Appalachian town was so thick in the back of my throat I needed to stay high just so I could keep my head above the bullshit and breathe.
I grew up bored as shit.
When we were young we destroyed things just to see them burn,
Beautiful and bright like cities lit up from afar
There was a life we weren’t living out there somewhere.
And when we were older, instead we burned each other,
Flesh and spirit, we clung to each other too hard and it still stings when it gets wet.
And I did get out.
My house was a crazy house turned mental asylum.
So goodbye to regret and abuse and fundamental values
Goodbye racial slurs, goodbye Dixie. I’m so over it.
And now, home smiles at me from behind bad perms and calls me on the telephone to tell me to be home before midnight.
It waves a confederate flag proudly from my bedroom window so EVERYONE will know where I came from.
Home lives in my closet as skeletons with names and faces not fully decayed.
It wears dark sunglasses and tells me it fell down the stairs.
Home drives a primer colored 1988 Cutless Supreme with no muffler so I can hear it coming from WAY down the road.
It sleeps till mid afternoon cause that’s when everything feels worse than it really is.
Home stings more than it burns, and it keeps a strict list of those of us who’ve escaped it.
It plays a cruel ping-pong game with our hearts.
It will do ANYTHING to get us back.
My hometown wears a t-shirt that says, “The south will rise again!” and I ask it, “From what? From the ashes of burned crosses and churches that still can’t be rebuilt in some neighborhoods?”
Home begs for me to understand.
Once, in the graveyard behind my house, we laid on the grass smoking a joint, and sucking the nitrous oxide out of whipped cream canisters. Anything to feel numb to this.
My best friend Amelia stood up, picked up a can, and fizzled out the last of the whipped cream in the shape of a swastika on the grass.
And we all stared at it in silence as if it were the most beautiful thing we’d ever seen.
She looked up, her gaze distant and said, “Fuck this shit.”
And we understood, and we walked back home without saying anything.
My hometown is a deficit and I’m still broke and it still begs me for pocket change.
It says if I can spare some change it can sure use it,
And I’m starting to see that I owe as much as I’m due from this place.
My heart tells me so.
Home knows all my secrets, and I keep running back there,
Whether I like it or not, empty resistance giving way to home.
Home knows me, and home knows I’ll keep running to it, and from it again
And home knows, that as long as we owe each other, we’ll never be broke.
