[Poem]: "Nostalgia Unrequited"

A narrative free verse poem on searching for home and finding it gone.

Since I've no ship to sail me away
From these loomings and presentiments of a lonely mind,
One locked in perpetual wander, so untethered to the heart
Of this place that I feel not the wildest rend--
Roots that grope round in the dark dirt for a saving drop,
And finding none, decay and wither they,
Brushing up against the nutrients blocked from want of water,
The very liquid of life;
And with no hats about to knock around--
So tempting in such a sour mood--
As they're a custom now discarded by the heads that people
The walkways, and the stores, and the grocers,
Like a sordid backdrop to life, no closer than the horizon--

I relinquished the pen in a desp'rate fit
For the soothing sanctu'ry of paint and canvas;
But when my rookie swaths stared unblinking back,
I eased off the easel and started drumming
With paint brushes; and yet, rolling round the heads and cymbals
In wayward washes of color, I failed to name the notes
That wandered in search of a mirage--
Under such suggestibility was I swayed
By the multicolor symphony of memory;
Tied to no mast I ventured out to follow the Siren's song of home.

And what joy I felt with no exertion
At seeing the signs so familiar to my innocent age:
Yamato Road, the link from outcast west to my friends and schools east;
And Glades Road, vast and densely flanked by shops and eats
That engorged an entire childhood!

I made giddy, sharp turns with a pressed pedal
On having in view my old elementary school;
The circumventing walls in part occlud'd a mural new to me,
Just beyond the sign with our Unicorn bursting forth,
But not the pitched roofs--so like Gothic spires
To a mind slowly boiling over with warm attachment--
Those roofs hanging over rooms whose walls are splatter'd
With formative warmth and fights and triumphs and failures;
And through the walls seeped the echoes of what I knew was there:
The forging of friendships in mutual misery on the blacktop courts
As they screamed back at our skins the scorching Florida sun;
Or the jungle gym where so many egos were flexed and thwarted;
Or the walkway that swung along the wide grounds--
In truth my favorite conjurer; O, if I could walk it again,
Walk with friends who'd soothe or foes who'd hound and tease,
Then from each step would wisp up some phantom
Of a life lived long ago and passed,
So dense is that path with broken effigies.

But then it came upon me like a sudden nausea,
A cool, noxious paradox of the familiar seeming strange,
As if what was before me was little more
Than a simulacrum of what was behind me--
But this wave now lapped and passed, the memories o'erflowed:
This part of the sidewalk was where I was scolded
By a neighbor for smashing a found beer bottle
And just up the road I snapped a broom in half 
And tossed it onto this stretch of street,
Both times to uplift the spirits of my broth'r out of the dregs of bad days
(I wonder if those scattered pieces still scurry round these parts)--
O, or this patch of grass trampled by my father's truck
As he hastily jumped out to greet a lounging gator face to face--
(Then came a shudder as if I were doing the same).

On and on I followed the flow of Spanish Isles,
Followed the flow of my old bus coming and stopping and going again,
Always roving up the street and never back down;
So simple a bench at the stop watched steadfast 
So much of my waffling and squirming in the angst of adolescence--
And rather than coffee spoons I counted my fleeting days in Prufrockian bus stops.

In haste I came round the bend passed the old home
Of a friend long since moved--I expected all the rush of excitement,
But when nothing came, I was left with only the dissociative knowledge
Of the absent feelings I should have on seeing the place--
Then I drove through my own dissipating ghosts that bustled in that intersection
Painted in blood from all the cuts and scrapes and falls on my blades
As I rolled through the curvature of the block--
O, how I dodged with grace here and jumped with perfect timing there to avoid
With my hard-won encyclopedia of the block's accepted imperfections
All the cracks, the ridges, the jutting, broken slabs of sidewalk
(The book, flimsier than papyrus, lost to me now from disuse, no doubt)--

Then I came to my home street, my car inching through
The thick and overgrown tendrils of a life long past--
O, here's the mailbox I stuck a half-eaten waffle in!--
The density of reminiscences collaps'd me into a distracted crawl--
I think this was the house of an old girlfriend,
And this house has new numbers from my friend knocking off the old ones--
And on and on those tendrils wrung my neck and choked me to tears--
    This is where that lady shrugged at me after running over my soccer ball,
    And this is the mailbox my brother smashed into trying to play football,
    And here's the old oak that always threatened our home in a hurricane,
    And this house had its porch ripped apart by the winds,
    And I watched through our living room window with horror and amazement
    As my father rushed into the furious, sweeping storm
    To dislodge a stray piece of porch stuck on our tree to save his truck;
    And--and words, words, these words are too thin a pipe to direct the flow 
                                                of this flood--
                                                So much learned at the punching bag
                                                Hanging in the garage,
                                                The front windows that projected
                                                My first night terror,
                                                Running over a nail sticking out
                                                The carpet of my parents' room,
                                                The pets that came and died,
                                                Scattered across in places now lost,
                                                All the love, the anger, the fears,
                                                The angst the shouting the crying
                                                The-sleepovers-the parties-
                                                Hugs-and-hope-and-kisses-and-smacks-
                                                And-loneliness-fury-confusion-elation-devotion--

And louder and louder and louder the symphony bellowed and thrashed
Its fortissimo colors about like a volcano erupting, until--

The beautiful blue façade's now a hideous, pallid yellow.
Envy clipped my breath: a sentinel fence stood tall
To block the view of the old lime tree (if it's still there)--
And this threw my mind into a frustrated, insatiable craze,
Fingertips grazing at the impossible chance
Of pacing those tiles again,
Of lounging on the couch again,
Of resting in my bed again,
Of living in my home again--
O, and for some serious seconds I toyed with the derangement
Of climbing through the once-broken window
And yearning, begging, pleading for just a moment inside again!
And I would not suffer a solace so Pyrrhic:
A modest house with an immodest price beckoned round the bend,
Mirrored right across the back of the old home,
But should I fill it with my life, it would only stay just as hollow.

Up on Glades Road, the three-lane width on each side was sobering;
And with the gas pedal steadier as I pulled into the plaza,
I strained a smile through the blossoming furor:
At my shoulder snickered some devil with incredulous tales
Of the painting revisited having been altered;
And the eyes botched a coup against the heart that nudged them to see:
It was all empty. Every one of them--gone.
With the edifice now stripped and washed over with a blinding alabaster white,
The memories that managed to free themselves
Fidgeted and grumbled and looked for a latch
In the desolation and found nothing; so up and out
They scatter'd like stirred bees roaming to sting
The croaking wind that mocked and unsettled them--
What happened to the arcade where so many birthdays were had?
What happened to the art supplies shop? To the bookstore?
To the little closet where I took my drum lessons?
All that's left are their aftereffects in me:
It was all empty. Every one of them--gone!

Yamato fared no better: It was long and empty.
Longer and emptier than I was willing to accept.
It ran passed old houses of old friends in communities
Gated by locks with no keys.
And it continued on, and on, and on,
Passed the downtown that is as foreign now as before.
And on, and on, and on it went to the thin beach
Lapped by waves that crept in their petty pace
And eroded the home so far behind me now.

More than Charley or Frances or Ivan or Jeanne,
Time gusted down more than trees and wires;
From the chaos of lives colliding and scatt'ring,
Time's come and buffed out the paint of place.

My first heartbreak, she took me by the wrist
Down the halls flecked with friends who watched and worried--
A teenage girl who did not know what she was wanting
And a teenage boy who did not know what he was doing--
On and on we rushed towards the swelling sounds of practice after school,
Music that hid our lusty sighs and whispers flowing from our secret nook--
So close hovered our lips suspended in brushing, chasing trembles--
A sforzando of passion that flourished then faltered
When came the last of her caresses,
So nonchalant and final only in hindsight;
Satisfied with mind free of future, she sauntered away so pleased with her work.
And in my daze my steady footfalls echoed through the empty halls,
Now so secluded from anything but memory.

And at this juncture, with only words to guide me,
A solemn truth slips from this quivering ink:
O, what did this visit do to me

But a hollowing out of the hopeful heart, adrift and quiet'd,
Now beating gravemente in the ache of nostalgia unrequited?

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