Bonedog (Poem from "I'm Thinking of Ending Things")

Coming home is terrible…

whether the dogs lick your face or not,

whether you have...

...a wife,

or just a wife-shaped loneliness waiting for you.

Coming home is terribly lonely...

so that you think of the oppressive barometric pressure

back where you have just come from with fondness,

because everything's worse once you're home.

You think of the vermin clinging to the grass stalks...

...long hours on the road,

roadside assistance and ice creams,

and the peculiar shapes of certain clouds

and silences

with longing, because you did not want to return.

Coming home is...

just awful.

And the home-style silences and clouds

contribute to nothing but the general malaise.

Clouds, such as they are, are in fact suspect

and made from a different material than those you left behind.

You yourself were cut from a different cloudy cloth,

returned,

remaindered,

ill-met by moonlight,

unhappy to be back,

slack in all the wrong spots.

Seamy suit of clothes,

dishrag-ratty, worn.

You return home,

moon-landed,

foreign.

The Earth's gravitational pull,

an effort now redoubled...

...dragging your shoelaces loose...

...and your shoulders,

etching deeper the stanza of worry on your forehead.

You return home deepened,

a parched well linked to tomorrow

by a frail strand of...

anyway.

You sigh into the onslaught of identical days,

one might as well, at a time.

Well...

anyway,

you're back.

The sun goes up and down like a tired whore,

the weather immobile like a broken limb while you just keep getting older.

Nothing moves, but the shifting tides of salt in your body.

Your vision blears,

you carry your weather with you;

the big, blue whale;

a skeletal darkness.

You come back

with X-ray vision...

your eyes have become a hunger.

You come home with your mutant gifts

to a house of bone.

Everything you see now,

all of it...

bone.