Oh, wanderer,
        Haven’t you strayed so far from home?
Back again beneath
the heavy sea-air of your childhood,
do you not feel some sense of homecoming?

The sun’s rays churn
        through thick pink ropes of rugged fog,
but thin and silver sky shines through above;
the periwinkle and the clementine.

This was the atmosphere you used to breathe—
the ocean called to you
        in its infinitude—
the moisture drove against your chest
and there, past the horizon,
        were the phantoms and imaginings,
        the protons that were raw material
        of life itself.

But as you flew you found the magic
        in the world,
beheld it tucked away in silent vales,
radiating from cool hollows,
roiling behind stormclouds
        in the mountain pass.
It was still the stuff of life,
still inaccessible.

The lights of man now twinkle
        on a whirling bay;
the currents underneath seem perma-drawn,
another facet mastered and commodified,
groomed rug laid out
        beneath electric hill.

The call had come from beyond the sunset,
but it was weaker there.

My wanderer.

If you have not found home again,
then you will find it.
Every journey is by definition unfamiliar;
        the winds, the world,
        unsavory and strange.

So if you look out on it all
and find it doesn’t catch your eye—
if you see the silly rituals
        that people do
and find them empty,
know that it isn’t proof
        the magic’s gone,
or that the greed in human hearts
has won the race.

When the places that you used to find yourself
        have all worn thin,
and the new lands rushing
        turn up stark and ugly,
know that the winds will change,
the weathervane will point a different way,
and threads of truth
will whisper to you from new places
        of new pursuits,
        of real satisfaction,
of true rest.

And this will be the hook that grabs you
        underneath the mind
and turns you out,
stretching,
unspooling,
and attuned:
        a bird aligned to catch
        the next magnetic signal.

And off you’ll go,
you wanderer,
forever on the chase
of the next big thing,
the grand unveiling that will
ignite you like a filament,
connect you to the current
running through it all.

And if your ideas of home
have always been illusory,
a swirl within the cat’s-eye
of the marble of the world,

Then find your home within,
        my dear one,
and there will always be

your love,
your tribe,
your shelter.