When did your home stop feeling like a home? Was it when the clocks stopped ticking? Or when the lights started flickering and you were too tired to change the bulbs? Was it when the flowers leading up the drive way wilted? Or when the windows became too hard to open because they were stuck? Did you realize it when the shower was always a touch too cold and your sink wouldn't drain completely? Was it when your favorite foods didn't taste the same way and your fridge was always empty? Was it when the candles you've always burned didn't have a wick to light anymore? Maybe home was never really home. A home doesn't take more than it gives. A home is what protects you, not makes you feel vulnerable. A home keeps you warm, not allows you to shiver until your muscles ache. A home is what keeps the light inside your eyes lit and keeps the flame in your heart burning. A home would never blow that flame out. Maybe your home wasn't your real home. You were just renting it until you could settle into your permanent one.

Lay this poet down
When the time arrives
In a field of fresh cut words
On a bed of softened rhyme

Feel free to cover me
From my head down to my feet
In a poetic form to keep me warm
Perhaps a blanket of allegory

Place a silken sonnet pillow
Underneath my weary head
In a field of fresh cut words
On top a rhyming bed

Today I'm going to stop loving you.
You are hard to love, but loving you is not hard.
I love the scent of your skin as I lay next to you in bed,
And the way your laughter curls at the ends of your lips,
Then erupts across your face.
I love you even when you don't love yourself.
But my love for you makes me weak.
When your sharp words are filled with anger and wrapped in bitterness,
They pierce through my heart,
I clutch my chest as the air leaves my lungs.
The pain crashes over me in continuous waves,
And I'm trying to keep my head above the water,
But the tears from my eyes are flowing like open flood gates.
And I can no longer see where I'm going, so I collapse,
Into a puddle, still gasping for air.