Aircraft Cabin

Snaking gold veins dribble and drip below
Tinned tuna somehow airborne
We’re chasing the sun with the moon
Bobbing like a white face at our backs
The clouds pulling cotton
Across our air-sucked eyes.

Home is a memory
Easily tampered with
How is it splitting so suddenly
At the seams?
Did you leave it in the dryer too long?
Did you photocopy it or
3D print it?
Which one is real?
It cannot- surely- be an
Aircraft cabin?

A place as uncomfortable as the man
Shuffling past you from that pencil-box bathroom.
His indigestion eyes are a warning worse than
Seatbelt signs. You really don’t want to go in there.

Home shouldn’t be
A scrabbling toddler’s kick
Or the quivering string of drool
That glitters from you
To the tray that the attendant is clearing.
Home is a collection of things
It is a hand-crafted alibi to prove
You danced, wore,
read, wrote, breathed.

There is a stuttering line of objects from
Your foalish careening into the world to
Your feet
and the thing attached to them.
Home is a proof of you beyond the mirror.
So, it cannot be a stinking port-a-potty
Whizzing through the clouds 12 kilometers
Up.

It can’t be a thing lobbed at the sky
Like some soda can crushed underfoot and flung-
Even if the person in the mirror there
Looks surprisingly like (an ugly) you
And you’ve crafted a house from the feeling
Of flight.

Home is “remember when-”
And a softness about the eyes
A memory, easily tampered with.

Artwork by Sally West, "Beach Study 1"