Home

Through shadows
and bent stalks
I noticed
motes
and
movement,
more lively with noise
than the highways
back home,
in my sunshine state.

But what is home,
unless it's where your blood
has been turned into the soil,
where your sweat has watered
hard-packed earth
and nursed
the poppies back to health?

I'd forgotten
that my roots run
back up the coast, and away
from oceanside
to mountain hot springs,
pastoral landscapes,
the smell of a hard day's work to come,
fresh on dawn's first breath,
the aroma of coffee and
wheat dust
what tugs me from a
toil-induced coma--
the restful slumber
that comes with
not enough time to over-think things.

I've been away too long,
living on
coffee and cigarettes and
the energy
of people pressed closely together on a train,
and the nightly
restless, toss-and-turn
sleep of the city.

I need to find
an eastward-winding dirt road
that leads where all roads do--
home.