Domicile

Home was never part of the system

---

You notice how easily  
people say home  
as if the word were muscle memory,  
already furnished, lit, inhabited.  

Most inherit it...
a place that answers when called.  

I’ve held it a handful of times,  
moments only,  
usually chemically furnished.  

Two: rural village path,  
my mother’s hand, my sister’s,  
their grip doing the holding.  

Two and a half: urban concrete basement,  
an “Aunt” who wasn’t,  
a man prowling the perimeter.  
Father.  

Four: council estate,  
another basement,  
streets named after flowers  
to mask the want.  

Seven: flat above,  
stepfather.  
Pig.  

Sixteen: sister gone.  
Eighteen: mother dead.  
Homeless inside two weeks.  

Years of chemical absolution...
bedsits, dens, borrowed floors.  
More years of liquid grace.  

Then flight: new country,  
new name, learned to pass.  
Ireland. Built one home,  
then another.  

Married. Child.  
Success measured in deeds.  

A bungalow now, countryside,  
land, quiet, money,  
structurally sound, legally owned,  
warm.  

I am not homeless.  
I am not unsettled.  
I am not searching.  

That is the trouble.  

An asylum seeker still believes  
there is a place  
they might finally belong...
even in tents, queues, under threat.  

I carry no such belief.  

Home was never a place I lost.  
It was a system never installed.  

I can occupy houses.  
I can love people.  
I can stay.  

But the thing others mean  
when they say home...
that unguarded settling,  
the nervous system finally exhaling...
never arrived.  

Half a century.  
Status resolved.  
Application closed.


-UpsilonA

---