Originally posted 3/1/2010.
Left at the top of the stairs
and then another left
and then a right
takes me into the blue room
I lived in through junior and senior high,
the room I drywalled
and painted for myself
with my father’s help.
I chose the color
and the now-embarrassing
blue shag rug.
(Blue was my favorite color then.)
I laid the oak floors
that lie beneath the carpet —
nailing through the tongues
of the narrow planks,
fitting the grooves to them,
beautiful unstained wood I covered
with blue shag carpet.
I chose these red and blue plaid curtains.
Dirty as hell, limp with fade and dust.
No one’s vacuumed since I left.
I just found a cannabis seed
in the rug under the side window
where I’d smoke late at night
from a homemade pipe
I made from an old steam radiator valve.
I had an FM radio then
that taught me how to hear
Mickey and Sylvia played
after Rashaan Roland Kirk
and I tried to stop thinking the world
was rigid and orderly.
One time I broke up with someone
and dropped acid late that night
and stared at my squirming self
in the mirror for a long time.
Afterward I took a piece of paper
from a spiral bound notebook
and wrote a whole story
that sounded pretty much
like this one.
If I lived here now
I’d tear up this rug.
If the oak still looked good
I’d sand and stain and polish it;
I’d change the curtains and
I’d certainly have to paint —
not blue this time,
or at least a different blue.
When I was done I’d play
the modern, stale radio,
smoke a big joint in plain view of the windows,
sit there and think about
Rashaan Roland Kirk
having the blues and one working arm and no sight.
Dig up a hazed memory of
“Rip, Rig, And Panic.” Then
I’d imagine him singing
“Love Will Make You Fail In School.”
That’s still true. It really will.
I can vouch for that
even if I can’t remember
more than that. Thank God
I’ll never have to do all that —
move back here
into this room
and cobble together
a new life
with the blue
and the dirt
and the leftovers. After all
you can’t go home again
when you never really left
and it never really felt like home to begin with.
Dark Matter 
May 14th, 2015 at 11:02 am
Funny thing about what feels like home….I moved from city to city and never lived in a house growing up……there are absolutely no traces of many of the places I’ve lived…..covered over with eight lane freeways.
Two places still feel like home today: The place I began: the French Quarter in New Orleans, I fantasize about having my funeral outside in Jackson Square across from the Pontalba Apartments where I lived as a child. I want Dixie Land music, lots of yellow flowers and yellow helium balloons, dancing and drinking and creole food,- the tourists, voodoo artists, transvestites, evangelists,working ladies, antique dealers, priests and nuns from St. Louis Cathedral on the square all welcome to join in. I want my ashes scattered in five places: 1. there in that square, 2. in my favorite city- Paris, 3. in our hundred acre wood, “First Day” where we raised out five kids here in Tennessee, (my second place that feels like home), 4. Birdsong my in-laws’ 150 year old log house near Nashville-where this apartment dweller city girl learned to love the country and nature, and my brother’s acres of botanical gardens he created near Houston, Texas, where I spent my high school and college years in an apartment that’s now under a freeway.
May 7th, 2015 at 1:51 am
Touché! The last line resonates so well for me.
May 7th, 2015 at 1:57 am
Thank you.
May 7th, 2015 at 2:01 am
I just read Kurt Vonnegut’s Man Without A Country and until I came to France, nearly each word resonated clear as a bell.