going home again
whenever I'm in town I drive by the old house
where my father's second marriage collapsed
& my step-mother became my mother after
he moved out & the house looks good, better
than my father ever did in his old age when
the strokes took him down to wild hair & crazy
eyes & shitting on other patients' beds before
his brain seized up & stopped, the white
trim still trim, the blue shutters still blue, the
dormer window in my old room still staring
at the street with a glazed eye & even though
almost forty years have passed since I stumbled
across the high school stage & into my own life
I long for that upstairs bedroom with the red
shag rug, the shelf of James Bond novels, the
Olivetti typewriter humming across the line,
the nostalgia of becoming who I became
in that small suburban room nothing more
than a lie I tell myself to sleep at night & now
my own house is full of things too precious
to give away, too worthless to sell, as if
that's any kind of inheritance for my kids
to wade through after I'm gone & I bet more
folks will attend the estate sale than the
funeral & that's just fine & dandy as can be
as long as I go out with my brain & bowels intact