The following poem was published in November 2012 in Ygdrasil, which boasts of being the oldest poetry journal online. I'd also add that it's one of the most serious.

Though published just a few short years ago, the poem, in its first iteration, was written in the early 1990s, which makes it nearly 30 years old. It has been revised a couple of time since then, but not much. It contains the original spirit and tone with only a few lines of imagery updated to a more contemporary malaise.

Image from Pixabay.
While I generally feel that good poetry needs no introduction, I feel almost compelled to mention a few things. First, like all literature, the poem--titled "On The Road Home"--relies on a central artifice. It is fiction, though the underlying theme itself is not.

As a young man, I struggled--psychologically, emotionally, and philosophically--with the common ideals associated with family. I had grown up in a very strict religious home claiming Christianity as its guidon. As I grew older, I began to question much of what I was taught and took note of many inconsistencies between the doctrines I had learned and the practices I had witnessed. While there are good memories and some positive values modeled, there was also a lot of dysfunction and abuse--mostly verbal and emotional. I was a wreck of a young man.

I wrote this poem while mired in a despondency that had me questioning why I kept returning home to see a family with whom I had little in common. We didn't appear to love each other, or did we?

That was how I felt at the time. Maturity and a spiritual regeneration years later have given me a different perspective. Yet, this poem remains. It mixes surrealism with traditionalism in a lyrical, almost prosaic, epic narrative similar to William Carlos Williams' Paterson or parts of T.S. Eliot.

Here's to hoping you can make sense of it.

On The Road Home

It is love that draws me here.

Year after daunting year, I, like a hunter's mad dream,
     enshrined by the dew, dawn ellipses trembling, dazed
     by the littered landscape, as if rowing along some Russian Riviera
     or traversing Esperanto trails, make my way
     back, back to nuclear origins, back to my vested youth
     and to the vertigo living room where first I
     cut my teeth on Saturday morning cartoons
     and Sesame Street; perverse Chinese art embalms my journey,
     makes it bearable. Ingrained deep within my bones
     lies the heart of humanity, engrossed
     in photogenic images, embittered
     creatures crawling up from the past to explore
     the largeness, the depths of cranberry cathedrals and mosques
     with minarets made of stone. I do not know whether to return
     is an act of grace, but I was born with one foot on the stage
     and one hand touching the sky; I was baptized
     by a culture of damnation while Christ sang hymns
     of beauty and agnostic gurus stripped bamboo shoots
     between naked teeth. Aaaah, but to go back is like running
     a thousand marathons without cleansing the juice that flows
     through aqueductian veins. I took the grand tour through mansions
     and wax museums, where golden-haired damsels dream of romance;

     dark, mysterious, lonely,
     they dance as lyrical ballerinas, toes
     curled like corn chips cavorting splendor;

     and in their short skirts they flirt with the same fluid style
     as their music -- lucid and ancient, timeless as the wings of Icarus,
     perfect as Pythagorean formulas, tilted and jilted like New Age melodies.

Image from Pixabay.
They wave from behind the dying tree
     where, as children, we swung from the circle
     of a tractor tire, arms spread out pretending to fly,
     our bellies plunged flat against the rubber
     filled with filth and father's beer; the tree then was young,
     where grandpappy hoisted us up with rope and pulley
     and laughed till his dentures spilled out onto the red dust
     of Texas clay;

     there they stand, these nymphs,
     calling me forward with smiles like pensive pale grins
     topped by spouts, looking like giant teapots
     bathed in blue, dripping of cunning. Lined up along the byway,
     stretched from mile marker 333 to the service station
     where I pumped my first tank of gas.

They remind me of the camaraderie of soldiers, to feel a part of something big.
     Nastassja Kinski and her serpentine slopes could not make me feel
     more welcome. In the dire distress of longing
     I search for the reasons, the reasons to turn back,
     the reasons not to go or postpone until another day,
     perhaps May or September, or even another year. Instead
     I drive on. Aboard the ISS cosmonauts reflect upon Plushenko
     spelling his name on ice. The Bible on the dashboard
     is open to Genesis Chapter 11
     and the Tower of Babel
     screams incoherently for forgiveness,
     but I cannot listen.

The nature of Indian folklore is elusive, it is everywhere
     and nowhere, and I have begged an audience with teenage rock stars,
     with princes, and with monks and priests
     to bow or pray before their altars and their thrones.

Image from Pixabay.
This possible adventure reels me toward the lurking lunacy
     of my childhood, exotic and neurotic, half-way erotic,
     fetches me an iron rod from which I gain new perspective,
     and hurls me into the bosom, an interlocking chasm of familiar sand,
     into the laps and lips of memories with high school divas and dames,
     sweethearts damned by their Penelope Pitstop cries, Alice in Wonderland eyes,
     or their pulpit flocking thighs sprawled out upon the rocks
     of dirty country roads; this trip back homeward
     to mother and blueberry pie, to the fleeting glimpses
     of lost unwholesome years and unforgotten sins:
     once again, this repeated ritual, this honest hassle, to drive
     and be driven upon, to wake and to remember
     the terrible tears cried upon poisonous pillows
     and to know, to suspect that after all it was just
     a token or a small friendly gesture, a kind affection
     flaunting yet fretting the long awaited embrace of imperfection,
     and the waiting to tell stories not yet written
     for generations unborn and not yet told to children
     not yet heard of: it was all this,
     the soft caresses of Maria What's-Her-Name,
     and the resting, no, the hiding in the warmth
     of her short brown arms, lips biting down upon hardened nipples
     in the glare of the midnight moon's keen oversight;

     it was the hard harsh hand of discipline
     that prodded me
     like cattle, the pull of sisterly kisses,
     the polite push of inspiration and the manic messages
     of Radio Ga Ga, Crosby, Stills & Nash,
     and Bob Seger melodically crooning "turn the page;"

Image from Pixabay.
     it was the flattery of fandango dances that forced me to go. Yet still,
     when I think back to the beginning, before igniting of fuel,
     before the crank of the key, before the locking of a hesitant house,
     when I could have decided not to come -- and here I am
     pulling into the willing wailing drive,
     yearning for remembrance,
     wide open like the mouths of codfish,
     and wondering what it was, back then, that compelled me go --

     in the grasp of stultifying fears, behind the mask of quaking heartaches,
     amid the pain of tender refusals, alongside faltering objections
     I had and still have; through all that, and the winnowing windows,
     the chiliastic chortles and portals of empty promises -- yes,
     even then I knew:

     it was love.
     All along it was the damned bullish bite of love.

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• Exquisite Corpse: A Perfect Day for a Murder
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• Exquisite Corpse, Speculative Fiction Writers, and Farmpunk
• Let's Decorate an Exquisite Corpse Together
• 5 Things You Should Know About Speculative Fiction Today
• Substratum: Decentralizing the Internet With Personal Computers

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