Nomad to Love

A nomad to Love

I want to wake up on someone else's couch

With creases on my cheek

Their cat licking my fingers for the salt

Too much sunlight telling me I've slept in again

Somewhere to be is Somewhere 

I don't know yet

But here, Someone Else's, I am

Imagining myself there, and full,

Painted in, a bookmark in yellowed pages,

To be found as if I was left

To return to

I want corduroy couches and shelves with titles

I will never read so must fill their pages with

My imagination

A nomad in my own mind

Never stay long enough to fully know it

But I imagine it's worth knowing, truly

Look, I know you want this,

But I don't think you actually want this

I remember pulling into your driveway in the dark

Listening to chamber choir music and

Singing the soprano parts I remember

Sitting there until the song was over, letting

Another one play, letting it transport me

Feeling a part of it, alone with it, inside of it

Then I went inside

You folded me into you, on your twin mattress

Another nomad, passengers preparing for transit

How many times 

Did you sleep beside me

How many times

Did I sleep on your couch

Pretending it was home,

Studying the walls like I was deep in an archaeological dig,

Imagining the person that must have lived there

What must they be now

Who would they see me as

Picking up their life in a picture frame

I am a nomad to love

Always traveling through

Making a home of every discovery

Mapping love in lines 

As if its boundaries

Would not be of my own creation

Maybe that's not quite fair, 

Collection is just a way to grasp at the edges

In order to expand

Look, I want you to know this

I want you

To know me

I want to know me

No, Me

Is a border on a map 

A line I draw for myself

And erase and try the stroke again

Till I am close enough

The sheets smell like me

The marsh forest smells like home

Sails in the wind are also flags

Push and presence

It is the cold side of the pillow

A new leaf on an ever-growing branch 

Of many branches

Is a nomad just an explorer

Without delusions of grandeur?

Christie Flemming