You don't have to move

A poem for a video Ken and I may collaborate on when time is on our side. To choose the home or our current family state we are living through right now, above any other escape or self-pampering we may have in mind:

We must want to be somewhere that makes us feel like home.
Not a country that makes you gasp and moan and claw walls for - but home.
Understand that it is perfect.

Perfect because it is imperfect.
Imperfect, because, it is home.
Where lust and greed and pride reside
Where charm and labour and silent suffering are bound to hide
Hide, in the quiet of your father's violent nature
In the chaos of your mother's warm, nurturing womb
And where home is,
There your heart will be also
There your bones will ache
For your treasure is one that will strike you
And never redeem you from the sacrifice you have made

This love -
It is a real one
And reality will lash its whips in your face
But use the same, porous kitchen towels that smell of sunflower oil to wipe the blood off your face - Face it -

Again it cuts
Again it soothes
Again it moves,
It has to move
But you don't have to.


In this country we have both called restrictive and lame and angry
On this land we have both deemed haunted and boring and repetitive
But I trust you, and I trust me,

That perhaps we may find this facet of us in a cold forest abundant with lush undergrowth and sweet, stark berries - which we call Iceland and Paris or London or romantic Rome
Find one's self as a god and chosen daughter of the universe, when the beams of the aurora borealis pour down upon me as hero, like the yolk of the sun of the City of Atlantis that once thrived and will forever be reborn again in your soul
But there can only be one hero.

And this trust we have in the countries that the mystery of being human has led us to want, to smell, to lick, to break into two -
Yet when I am a screaming demon,
Cursing my deserved quality of life,
The standards I can never again achieve
The free songs of a bird I may never again sing -
Life tells me to trust it.
Because:

Again it cuts
Again it soothes,
Again it moves, it has to move
But you don't have to.

Still, should you be on your way,
Run home.