Staying with strangers while they're gone

A poem written in an unfamiliar house

I’m always home, but never for too long for

Shifts staying nights in the beds of strangers that smell of bleach and exhaustion and sunlight and sometimes oregano I dust 

the tables and find cleaning supplies before I go, wipe the windows 

in case I walked towards them in my sleep and ran my fingers down the glass paneling that looks as if it was installed yesterday

The couch is blue suede and I imagine myself sinking into it every time I lie down 

except for when I’m holding their hands

Falling through the gap where the pillows meet the cushions and falling down under

Maybe someone lives under the shiny wood paneling that hasn’t touched bare feet until mine I would let myself regretfully

fall deeper and deeper until I had molded a bed of soil and debris to sleep

and play in the mud when it rained, wash my face and my hands and plant my feet deeper than the water drains and I’d watch

A couple from a catalog come home from an anniversary vacation, they didn’t sleep for the best reasons and when they did they still faced each other unconscious 

and they weren’t even angry when they left, not for the lack of beauty in their destination

but because they left together, and could only beg to be in each others arms, favored location over mountain cabins or sandy islands, so home they are

Home I am 

The bed feels emptier after basking in the love of others for weeks

I wake cold, long sleeves in the morning, sun waking slow, letting light warm enough to bathe the whole world in alternating pools of light

Lying down to eat and sitting up to sleep

Slow morning without any heat, it’s a waiting game and the Sun, she knows best

I choose to bask in your love and wait for it to go home

It’s my turn to go home

But now, the lights on either side of the dining room, did you pick them out together or

did you fight about which ones you wanted, or did one of you sneak them in without the other noticing

Were the paintings from your childhood homes, or did you buy art together

Did you fight about his love for realism and your abstraction, did you blend them together, did you paint the canvases or did you paint

The walls egg shell, I’m sure you did it together

I extend my arm and reach to the top of the doorframe, dragging paint down the wall because maybe there’s love left in the paint strokes

Maybe it’s in the color, or the lack of

I’ll pretend to feel it all until I’m too tired to know if I ever will

A game of dress up to light me

While we wait for the sun to come back

-B