Hometown
Madison Yardumian
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Dear Hometown,
I started writing this With a dying pen And doesn’t that say it all? Please don’t run from me Like I ran from you Look I know we’ve both moved on It’s just Questions keep dripping from my mouth Like a leaky faucet And I need to quell The fire on my tongue I’m just wondering: How can you be so green When I know for a fact Nothing grows here? Do you have a fine assortment of paints And an artist’s hand? Blending colorful swirls Into the autumn leaves Adorning the summer sunset With a pink blush Creating a vibrancy too shocking to be real Yet so excitingly lifelike Do you realize how much of you is empty? Your houses, like gapey-toothed smiles Are lined purposefully far apart From one another Because you are so fixated on Maintaining appropriate distances That children hold their breath Transfixed by the Quiet hum of absence And nobody plays Has anyone ever told you You remind them of wintertime Dressed in white? If so They see through you Straight to your hollowness To the dustiness of your dying roots Languishing In some far off sense of purpose That tastes like history standing still Do you know your trees are starving? Stripped to the bone Their willowy fingers shake Overwhelmed by your frigidness They are subject to the feeble roots You exalt like a deity They bask in the godlessness Of worship without reason Do you feel ghostly? As if the spirit of something alive Runs through you Like a broken promise You stretch into a world That feels endless And yet When I look upon the gravestones of teenagers I see the end right in front of me And I realize three crucial facts:
So when you ask me Why I’ve never felt complete Just remember I come from the land of empty spaces And painted places You know better than anyone That I learned Beauty in lieu of sincerity Color in lieu of warmth I watched you trace my figure Until I became a jumbled Collection of disjointed shapes And now I know How the sun makes shadows So every day I find myself Making art In the parts of me you stole And every day I must remind myself It takes more than paint To be whole. |