Your body is your home.
You wouldn't tell someone their home is too big or too small,
The ceilings too short or too tall
The wallpaper, skin, too old, wrinkled, crumpled and peeling or not the right tone.
The frame and foundation of bones connecting,
Some with clean cut marble perfection, some with broken bits and Floorboard splits.
But you wouldn't tell someone their home is too old or too new.
The value of the pipes, veins, visible in clenched fists.  The arch of an eyebrow or the shape of the roof, a scar or tattoo.  
You take care of your home because your life is here.
Inescapable, a cage within your ribcage.  
You hope and pray that if you take care of it then it will take care of you, Shelter you.
You wouldn't burn your own home.  Cut, scrape or bruise the stars locked On one side of your eyelids, your windows.  Who knows which side?
Your body is your home.  It is the only place you will ever truly be able to call home, the only thing that you will ever truly own.

Is growing up realizing that the monster is not under your bed,  but is instead lying right next to you?

And you go on living your life
Just as vibrantly as I live mine,
Just as vibrantly as anyone else.

Inspired by As I Walked Out One Evening by W.H. Auden

As I walked out one evening under the blanket of dark blue sky
Thinking about the week to come
Will the days be remembered, or rather wasted and forgotten?
Each tired child thinks the same thought.

Sunday nights slip into Monday mornings
Mondays slowly become Tuesdays;
Yet somehow the days become one
Each tired child unable to differentiate each day from the last

Wake up, brush teeth, brush hair, repeat.
Math, English, read, write, factor, and repeat.
Return home, work, eat, sleep and then repeat.
Each tired child thinks, “Is this really living?”

Stuck in a labyrinth of concrete
Routine forces every move
Taunted by the warm blanket left behind, only to leave a blanket of papers
Each tired child stares at the ticking clock.

Thoughts interrupted by bells at the same time
Routine consumes every thought
Each indistinguishable day
Where each child struggles to lift heavy eyelids.  

Same faces seen every day
Same places seen every day
Weeks blur into months, which in turn disappear in the minds
Each tired child fights every robotic move.

Closing doors and opening books
The teachers scream and roll their eyes
Where thoughts aren’t thoughts unless they are in Times New Roman
Each tired child strives to be heard.

As I walked out one evening under the blanket of dark blue sky
Thinking about the years to come
Routine is inescapable while spontaneity is a distant myth dreamt up in the minds
Of each tired adult who forgets what it’s like to be a child.