Homecoming

Brown the walls, dark the coffee stains
The carpet maroon, dusty museum rope
Smell of age-old food and medication tethered ‘round my nostrils
and the snaky rattle of the drinking fountain
spitting out water, poisoned and polymer.
Nicotine rooms with flyspecked floors as an oxygen tank
that muffles the soft, raspy sweetness of your voice.

It was the eighth of November.
Words whispered through willows of the unconscious,
Taunted by distant gestures of a clock crucified to the wall
With each second, pulled farther from the seconds that were ours,
when sunshine bled into your venetian blinds like grapefruit
and a deck of cards lay scattered on your bed.
Gin and rummy and games I never bothered to remember
between the indifference of your machine and cigarette breaks.
Fresh spring flowers and watered-down insta-coffee
soaked into my nostrils as I wheeled your throne
on wood etched with trails of a thousand others.
The legless man who roamed the hallways and never missed a hello,
Where is he now?

For 22 months you called it “home” but as you jerked your hand
from a compendium of phone numbers—addresses—grocery lists,
and jerked my tears to diamond dust
we knew it was not quite that, a mere mat at the door.
So when I float back to that November frost and the
cerulean clouds clashed against crimson sky,
I think of that mat at the door where you went to die.

Called it a garden on the sign, but what a joke, we knew.
The only thing that grew – your own impatience,
and I guess sometimes my love.
Even if it didn’t always outpace the hasty fleets
of birthday cards—grocery lists—poorly-assembled desserts,
usually shipwrecked upon arrival.

“Tell them I’m not here” I said when the phone intruded,
grabbing the month’s worth of laundry and inhaling a petting zoo
and abruptly vanishing, because sometimes the car radio
was an easier conversationalist.
Your hands were soft as a pincushion
and your body a mere framework
and you shrank into a new wardrobe each week
to break the static, because there had to be some change that didn’t
make its way into the backs of the daily paper.

It was the eighth of November.
Your hand squeezed colors into mine
under a cotton candy sky,
whether an act of conscience or electricity,
of love or of urgency.