Home
However familiar I've ever grown, I’ve never known
Never both: source and target

I wasn’t lost; I drew the map
Source and target, I designed my path
A vagabond—nomadic accident
The smile was honest underneath the mask

And I tore my life more than thrice in pursuit of happiness
Tossing darts at my atlas heart, the target moved; I always missed

Home
However familiar I've ever grown, I’ve never known
Never both: source and target

I fell in love; I’ve been admired
In the eyes of lovers, yet never really seen
Tried to become what they desired
In the ideas of others I was never really living

Home is both the target and the source of love
The source and target I have been in search of

Home
Whenever enamored I have become, I’m never done
Looking for both (Source and target)
Not that I’m unhappy or better on my own 
But it’s never home: source and target

(However familiar)

Home is both the target and the source of love
The source and target I have been in search of

Home
However familiar I've grown, I’ve never known
Home
Whenever enamored I have become, I’m never done
Looking for both
Wherever, whether together or alone
I’m never home: source and target

Serendipity’s pleasant voice
That persuasive illusion of choice
Sang soft and sweet as a siren in my ear

I'd been fooled by lesser claims
I've committed worse mistakes
Said it’s a risk I have to take on you, my dear

Searching never would have found you here
Listening could’ve never helped me hear what’s now so clear
And I admit, it’s been a good, good year with you
Could it be so simple?

I’d’ve learned any language
I’d map it out with patience
But countless are the wordless ways we communicate

Show me how to dance the way you do
And I’ll move with you
Somewhere close or so very far away

You can take my name or keep your own
We don’t ever have to prove anything to anyone
Just as long as I still feel like home to you
We can keep it simple

When you’re happy and alive
Or when you’re sad and tired
It’s easy and simple—steady and simple
When you’re caught between moments
When you feel it or when you don’t
I am ready with simple, steady and simple

Look me in the eye; there is no riddle (Searching never would have found you here)
You shouldn’t wonder how I feel (Listening could never hear)
It’s uncomplicated
Happiness is somewhere in the middle

Look me in the eye; it’s simple (You can take my name or keep your own)
No riddle; I know that you know (You know exactly how I feel)
Just the way if feels (We don’t have to prove anything)
It isn’t complicated
Happiness is somewhere in the middle with you
Where the love is simple

I'd like an opportunity to age, if not so gracefully
By your side
I have noticed that I seem to live a bit more patiently
When I can feel your hand in mine

Let’s do all the things we’ve loved to do forever
And some of them, now, we’ll do together

The way I see you now is the way I’ve seen your smile in photographs
When you’ve been far from me
It’s harder to fear the future after the past few years of gratitude
Carved themselves into my face

In lonelier years, the saddest songs helped me feel alive
You know the kind

Maybe it’s time
To change the words to every sad song we’ve ever loved
To something happier
Something like the way I felt with you
When we sang along
Emptied our lungs, dancing in that sea of strangers
Where I’d finally admit what you already knew

In lonelier years, the saddest songs helped me feel alive
I’m changing the words

If I, ever and anon, feel lonely by your side
And I begin to doubt, as certain as the tide
You turn that smile on, and I see you again
Like when we were new

The flow, the ebb
It all begins and ends with you, the rock that I cling to

Ever and anon, I’m lost in reverie
Of lonelier poets’ nostalgia for life I never lived
Whenever I am gone, it’s where you’ll find me:
Inventing memories

And love, whenever and anon it’s crowded in your head
A maze inside your heart, a question at the center
I’ll open every door and measure every breath
And I will remind you

I’ve followed the path
Of fear before; that map was torn in two
And still led back to you

Ever and anon, I’m lost in melody
A lonelier voice’s cathartic, ritual soliloquy
Ever since I was young, I’ve been listening
For that harmony

Wherever and anon, if I’m where I belong
Sweet serendipity, stumble into me

I felt sure long before I ever spoke the truth
Withheld it long enough for doubt to take its root
I wandered far beyond the evidence to prove
Whether I was wrong, as if I always knew
Forever and anon, as long as I’m here with you
My love, I believe, I’m holding onto

The trust that, whatever and anon, by loosening my grip
I’m strengthening my hold on the most precious gift:
A friend to grow old with

Lioness, I’ve been trying not to miss
The days, precious and limited
In the night, I slumber while you hunt

Rise when you rest
Begin where you end

While the moon and sun are chasing above my body and in your mind
When you’re feeling crescent, I will be gibbous
And witness our circadian tides

When you’re by my side
In my dream, you are a mountain that I climb
And I scale every disk of your spine
To dig into the summit
To look inside the back of your mind

Talking in my sleep, you were hearing everything
Replacing each terror with a merciful reprieve
By daylight, I study your stasis

Are we living the dream?
Do we know what that means?

With the sun and moon still racing through the marrow of your mind
I’m deflecting your demons, rechecking your pulse
As I watch, in wait, with a weather eye

And I’m by your side
As you dream, I watch your breathing fall and rise
And I log any dance of your eyes
For clues beyond the surface
To see inside the back of your mind
To look inside the back of your mind

Lioness, I’m trying not to miss
The days, precious and limited

If I can’t figure out how to fold that last question back into my mouth
How will I swallow the truth?
If you can’t shape the answer into something half-resembling the way you once felt
Then I guess we’re really doomed

This skeptic heart’s still learning to trust
That love is a kind of friendship
Earning is giving it up

Rally your love for me
I’ll rally my love for you

Do you remember me? Still whom you’ve loved, or tell me:
Have I not become who you wanted me to be?

We chose not from chase of fear this path we blazed, together, to here
Yet it found us, just the same, without even ourselves to blame

The stoic art is learning to let go
That happiness begins within and without oneself (Ha!)

Rally your love well
Ready to let go

I need to believe that it wasn’t all imagined
Wasn’t all invented
Teach me the difference between a delusion and a challenge
How will I trust again?

When will I learn the lesson? Does it even exist?
If love is a kind of friendship, how does it come to this?

In selective memory and historical revisions
Write me out of your emotions (Kill the pain)
I cannot do the same

Help me reclaim my future without burning the past
Haven’t we made of ours one that deserves to last?
If love is a kind of friendship, why do I have to ask?

If I can’t figure out how to fold all these questions back into my mouth
Then I guess I’m really doomed

This is home, warmth, love, happiness
Time, gratitude
It’s my home with you

And I see you when I look around
In every inch of my life
I see the way I’ve felt with you
Glowing in this light

I can see, hear, feel us laughing and
Loving, singing, planning, dancing
It’s a dream

Falling asleep here with you missing
In our empty apartment
Feels like giving up
I’m so tired but I’m not ready
I’m not ready

It was "no more nightmares
Sleep easier, now we're home"
"We’re really living the dream, aren’t we?"
And now it’s "goodbye sweet dreams"
Our foundation crumbles as I sleep
The nightmare is awake, not me
Not me

Here is our home, new again; bare walls, patient with potential
The gold hardwood floor still waiting for the shadow of our black faux leather sofa
The forsaken guest room door ajar, beyond the dark, unwanted television
The bright, open kitchen wishing for the soundtrack of Elbow and Damien

Rising through the stairway landing where we’ll integrate our friends’ art on display
The old brick and space left naked for the photographs we’ll take but never frame
The hollow of the walk-in closet where we’ll laugh at how even your jeans fit me
In the nook with the red Japanese chair, the deluge will lull us both to sleep

The skylight in the vacant corner of the loft will cast our bed like a cathedral
Where I will sneak snapshots of you dreaming blissfully in that summer sun cascade
Nearby, the gas stove—sitting cold—will drive the winter from our bones
Beside the gap for the piano and the strings we’ll tune to summon spring

And we will choose our favorite sad songs, substituting words to make them happy
Recorded evidence of our love, compellingly performed but incomplete
And we will learn to synchronize our walk and let the music move us in time
And I will try to lead you, hand in hand, cheek to cheek, your chest pressed to mine

We’ll embrace until the dance is over, then we will leave no trace of it behind
Only the bats in the ceiling will remember that vinyl record skipping in my mind
But I’ve already carved the shape of you into the songs and rhythms of my life
It’s too late to separate the future from the dream

Into the brightest future, with interlacing fingers
Synchronizing strides would bring us home
We were singing every anthem that brought us close together
’Til I forgot how it feels to be alone

Through the whitest winter, we’d weather any blizzard
Harmonizing voices to keep warm
With the sound wrapped around like blankets by the fire
’Til we forgot the feeling of the cold

I came to feel nowhere could be too far from home

Now the future isn’t what it used to be
Broken in selective memory

Soon the darkest summer would chill me to the bone
Paralyzed in choice, but not my own
With the future I remember in photographic fiction
Revisions of the truth you’d always told

Your smile became my home; I see it in everything I own

And the future isn’t what it used to be
Broken in selective memory
Where the truth is mixing with the make-believe
Twisted in revisions of history

Through blurry vision, I see your smile
A joyful image frozen in time (A sweet illusion burned in my mind)
I feel our future leave me behind (I’m unable to rewind)
I violently shiver, though I’m on fire

I had a dream that you loved me again
Then I awoke to this empty bed

Now the future isn’t what it used to be
Broken in selective memory
Where the truth is mixing with the make-believe
Twisted in revisions of history

Love, I want to see you happy
But you should know
My home leaves with you when you go

I always stood outside the drama until it found me here, alone
Always was the last to judge, never cast a single stone
I always sussed out the motivations, won’t assume what I don’t know
Until you thrust me in the spotlight where every word cuts to the bone

Now you have trained me to feed a part of me I didn’t know
It has changed me in ways I don’t want to ever show

Blood’s running cold
Trust bought and sold
A violence too hot to hold burns a hole through my hand

"You cannot fix him with forgiveness; he doesn’t know the sting of guilt"
"Suffering the consequences doesn’t make one the victim"
I can’t protect you with persistence from your own decisions
Love was never the elixir if this is "Stockholm syndrome"

And you have trained me to feed a part of me I didn’t know
It has changed me in ways I don’t want to ever show
While you explain what you needed, what you thought but never told
What was made and believed. You may never fill that hole

And my blood’s running cold
Since my trust was bought and sold
A violence too hot to hold burns a hole through my hand

And it burns, and it burns, and it burns, and it burns, and it burns, and it burns, and it burns

And I never learned to pretend for your most judgmental friends
I never dreamed I’d been assessed before a classist audience
Overheard underhand. Now all the voices tend to blend
An ultracrepidarian, incessant ringing in my head

With every word of dissent, the gas was lit with good intent
By opportunist sycophants or sympathetic innocents
Guess the absurdist defense—that narcissistic artifice
Begins to make a lot of sense after they’re sleeping in your bed

And it burns, and it burns, and it burns, and it burns, and it burns, and it burns, and it burns

I must release this burning coal before it burns a hole through my hand
I must release this burning coal before it burns a hole through my chest
I must release this burning coal before it burns a hole through my hand

Rewind one season’s turn
When I last heard
Your eyes, your hands, your heart
Your mind. I should’ve seen it coming
No longer humming
Your light, your signal dark

As it slips into the past, it still feels like the future
Our big, bright life together
Was I living in a dream?

Ritually, I’m reliving the ending
This futile reinventing
Always the same result:
Hypnopompic reverie relenting
To whelming disillusion
Over where I am, where you’re not

And I swore that I could feel your body next to me
Your smile, your holding arms
Could I go back to sleep?

Don’t wake me

In an ocean of reasons that I can’t comprehend
The stars do not reflect
It washed away the answer like footprints in the sand
The dots just won’t connect
And my shouting is a whisper drowning in the waves
I awaken tangled in my bed
As the question on my fingers, I struggle not to send
Comes pouring down my face, instead:

"Did it take you half a decade to decide
That I’m not good enough?
Or was it always a lie?"

Don’t wake me

Sunburns on my skin, moonburns on my heart
All the parts I missed healing in your arms
Footprints in the sand, dancing in the dark
Reclaimed in the ocean, grain by grain, the pain restarts
Sunbeams strike my lids, pull the dream apart
Empty like the pillow far from where you are