A Journey Home

Home will always be home.
Your roots have a way of pulling you back
and on the way back you pass branching memories.
Remember the date you had off that exit?
You went to a nice Mexican restaurant.
Enjoyed a good meal.
Can you pull up that thread and
see what happened next?
Did things go wrong or
just not work?
The end of the thread appears
to be severed.
You should dig deeper
but I’m afraid that file no longer exist.
It wasn’t important enough to keep.
Down that road is the hospital
where you were born.
Gallows Road.
The perfect name for a hospital address
when you consider we all one day
leave out the freezer.
Don’t mind my bleakness.
Let’s find a happier memory.
There’s the baseball field where
you played little league
until you washed out.
Couldn’t hit the curve,
or the fastball either.
Sent you back to tee ball.
No one tried to teach you.
Over there is the church
where you did science camp.
Hard to reconcile with modern debates
a church teaching science.
Things were different then.
No one got stuck on chapter one, and
knew loving your neighbor
was the truth that they sought.
A ways further is the mall
where you had such good times.
What was it you did there exactly,
wander around?
Is time wasted when it is
spent with friends?
You don’t think so but then
your mall become nothing
but a shell.
Empty hallways and abandoned stores.
Now it is something shiny and new.
Refitted for a world
with less wandering around.
Talk about changed.
Isn’t that where that one pizza place was.
You know, the one where you
made your own pie.
Put it in the oven and all.
Can’t imagine them letting kids
do that now.
Was it there, though?
Where those high rise apartments are now,
or was it on 234?
236, 234, Duke Street, Little River Turnpike.
Is there even a 234?
I bet that was that pizza place,
or was it there?
One way or another
it is long forgotten rubble now.
Discarded in a landfill
or recycled into cinder blocks.
There’s nothing else
worth remembering here
until the next time
you are overwhelmed by
the lure of home.