love note to beetles and worms.

i long for home,

though it is not a house.

no kk whatever

no house number 23.

i find the act of saying the words

“i want to go home”

more comforting than the softness of my sheets.

i have lost something

something i’ve never quite possessed

like i awakened

with a name i did not choose

and a path which my legs will not travel

tell me, what is home to the lost?

will i know rest only when i find it?

perhaps.

i want to lay in a garden of weeds

naked as the day i was ripped from my mother

and be so still that you cannot see where

my skin ends and the earth begins.

i want to not flinch at beetles and worms,

to walk a land that knows no border

and bathe in a lake where

living things cannot be named trespassers.

i will smoke from the pipe of an old witch

and taste her freedom from its neck

i will savor the teachings of her silence

and dance to the tune of her wheezing cough

i will bask in her toothless grin

until the day I become her.

yes, maybe then I will be home.