Traveling

New poem.

We travel too often into places
where deceptive shadows
promise mystery and romance
only to reveal teeth
when we lean in, eyes closing
before an anticipated kiss.

We travel too often into places
where springs that bubble forth
from those shadows
are cold and quenching but taste 
of that blood-filled ground 
in which they rise.

We travel too often into places
where we eagerly seek a home
before we understand
how where we’ve arrived 
is exactly like where we came from
and how much we brought with us from there.

There’s no moral to this. There’s no
simple lesson. We travel to places
that promise those things
because we cannot recognize 
that they will never be given to us,
that we have to take them where we find them.

To do that,
we have to stop traveling,
constantly traveling, in the hope
that what we find will be
well-fed, kindly, satisfied,
and waiting to meet us on our terms.