West Horizon Ridge*
   or *sage and passing lights

I return to where I've always been.

This home will stay remembered
through being turned, closed, and reclothed.
It's silvery smell and glassy echo are well set-in
and still shudder me, thinly, again and again.

A sticky swell of it's air swims in my lungs
as I enjoy this breath of ghosts.
Here, such joy had flashed and dimmed, vivid blue
like paperclip antenna picture tubes.

Ripostes - we're obsessed, an unsynced incessant choir.
I decide I'm flush with ink and should retire.

      Against cushions crush,
      the sway-back boy who raised me
      is phased in the yawning fog of sleep,
      cheek grazed by a dog's red maw,
      breath drawn through this alloy heap
      of buckskin and blush
      and rest employed if only for a moment.

      His troubles flog him, hurried eyes creased with claret
      for want and worry and the weight of ceaseless waylay.
      My perpetual prologue,
      our voices and faces framed as plain analogs
      and I'm never apart from him this way.

      I always want to protect my heroes,
      to be a fount of affection and human home,
      to repay the blown doors closed
      and sores sewn away.

I disembark the departed portrait and dispatch the lights,
the acquainted old entry grieves quietly for life.

Fatigued, I walk down and sink, haunted,
into the faded tracks of our tires,
gray-black and cracked but relieved.
Silently swing the gates, blue-green and gaunt,
my growing-up gradually heaved,

flaunting the old sass of my almost-everythings.
I conspire to return where, or more how, I belong.
The pavement's slick in the rain,
flickering in the sage and passing lights
that say my spirit, sealed there, feels right.

My love for this memory is so honest and hurtfully aged,
how I hope so hard my heart will always break this way.