A Home in the Sky

I have finally packed up my bags
taken one last look around
switched off the light
and walked out of that monstrous
lovable thing entangled now,
forever in my heart
and perceptions of the world.

Leaving West Africa
was the sound of velcro ripping
apart, the smell of grease and smog more
beautiful, the noise and grit of public and poor
now a colorful and painless thorn in my side.

The day I flew away, the golden red sun sat
heavily over Accra's smoke, its lidless disc so flat
against a blue cloudless sky. Fat ladies in bright color,
their homes stacked on heads bobbed
through the city dust to its unharmonious pulse.
The static of chaos
and public life crawled through the streets,
inside and quiet only to sleep.

A jet named Leonardo Da Vinci carried me
not home, but first to Rome where the beauty eyed men
were like butter on my tounge; sweet and indulgent looks.
grazie, arrivaderci, arrivo un attimo, ciao bella...
the words milled the air into a thousand tiny tingling melodies.
I saw the espresso bars and my heart lurched,
longing this to be my home, as it once was.

But my home is not a place, it is not my final destination
on flight 209 today. It is all of the pieces of people
that reside in my bones
now that they've come and gone
and will come again in multifarious colors.
I am them and they are me and my home
is a flight of the world,
back and forth between the safe abodes of belonging.
Belonging only occurs without place.

The wings lift over grey fog and the ocean
interrupted by city sprawl, legs of a mechanized spider
flattened into terra. Now white, and it is gone
just the roar of kinetics and steel and the air,
that empty space where I am neither here nor there.

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