someone asked me what home was...

{Inspired by the poem by E.E. Cummings}

someone asked me what home was,

what it felt like to be alive.

I thought for a moment,

dared for a tenth, hundredth of a second, to live in a dream.

all I could come up with were three things;

love, wanderlust and the ocean.

from the back:

the ocean.

funny, most people don't realize we have two oceans,

one above and one below, you can dip your toes in both.

below,

the water stretches far and wide,

pushing waves from below the horizon,

a darkness hiding the rich reefs and beautiful bioluminescence below,

storms will lumber across, great and electric,

meteor showers rain down from below, a summer shower of magic,

a gift from one ocean to the other.

above,

a great fabric, a synaesthete's sandbox,

full of supernovas, singularities and stars at the edge of the ephemeral,

our world spins and dances along the galactic bow shock,

thrown deeper and deeper into sidereal time,

some scintillating soothsayer smoking dust into stars,

lights flashing from Beetlejuice and the Dog Stars,

letting us know we're home.

wanderlust.

you see it everywhere at home,

on the great ships prowling the sea with unicorns on their bows,

on the Swiss army knives cutting branches for firewood,

on the graffiti in the inner-city, murals with no artist standing for time eternal,

on the children diving into the lake, only to surface with cubes of pyrite,

on the planes falling out of the sky, diving towards the ground (only to fly back up on sunlit thermals),

on the exhaust from cars spinning in epicycles around flags hoisted by gales, their grills too pretty to be clean,

wanderlust dusting the fingers of the new Americana, ephemera, copper to gold to jade,

(always platinum to us)

a smell like petrichor, like musty Moleskine, like a breathless run amongst the cloud forest.

love.

at this I pause, thinking--

the weight of five thousand years of writing about love,

from cuneiform, to Mesoamerican glyphs, to proto-Chinese characters on the steppes of Mongolia and China,

never mind centuries of American music and poetry alone, set to describe this very feeling.

I didn't try to trump any of it, instead,

I said:

love is running breathless through the forest,

a canvas of stars providing illumination, or maybe just the constant blue of the sky,

tripping over branches and skidding, stopping suddenly, whenever the pelt of a deer comes into view,

knowing nutation will make this moment shorter than it needs to be.

love is being able to look someone

(or several someones)

in the eye and say,

"feels like I'm always lost, and I'm probably gonna cry,

I'm sorry, I can't hide it from you."

only to see their eyes explode into color,

irises you can fall into, kaleidoscopic and dizzying,

an anchor in a darkling sea,

sensation erupting, lightning free from clouds,

whereas the world turns a dark grey,

there's something in their eye that evolves into something more,

transcending even violent violet,

lotus flowers budding from chrysanthemums and carnations.

love is the last feeling before death,

where no matter how cold and hateful you were,

sheer warmth and painful love rushes into your chest,

an entire ocean of pressure beating in your ribcage.

love takes the saddest part and makes it beautiful,

outshining the galaxies soaring above and below on great Jovian waves,

even as it all comes down, 

and with tears searing holes in your cheeks, 

moissanite, silicon carbide, shattering your eardrums and piercing your heart,

love makes it okay, alright,

a great human emotion, one all share,

at home.