fourth wall

we all know it
is fashionable to talk about it
home, that unpretty
thing only in poems
i can shake

the cobwebs clinging
memories singing thread-thin but i’m holding on
like prey;
there’s a reason
nostalgia is only felt from afar.
home, is the sun is a lucky penny
tossed from the window but
makes my heart, that thing
of wax, throb
so i fall

as icarus
and drown as narcissus
staring still
at the fourth wall;
paper butterflies hung there,
a list of my dreams stuck
on with blu-tack,
till the wings crumpled
and i grew up;

home is old
selves trapped
in the flaking paint
of the fourth wall

of my bedroom.
a poem plucks
beauty out of ruins
or the bored;
metamorphosis. change. other buzzwords
like home
it’s just walls gathering memory
dust; a poem sweeps
away the tear,
like eyelashes lowered to the skin, here
i cry
for a home
but only as four letters
or four walls,
never definite or pretty or
real.

Artwork by Mequitta Ahuja, "Journeyman", 2015