I typically don't write out posts that deviate from my usual cadence of cosmic and universal imagery but this piece I belive can take you back to haemorrhage and blood in a way nothing can. I hope if nothing, you can at least feel the bite of my venom on your nape

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Home is a juniper pond, salts of emotions, crystallizing to form bonds. Frost patterns, materialize on the sun kissed surfaces. Periwinkle wisterias drape around this pond, a grand entrance furnished with white marble. Floral chandeliers embossed like little suns to our modest home. Lights that twinkle a French glow, my bushed feet cuddling with the Jamaican carpets. Medals, awards and honors festoon the wall like family photographs. The winter recital, the ballet theater, the perfect hundreds in organic chemistry or the 10-page long thesis on neuromorphic computing; all stained with sweat and blood.

Canons engraved on the shores of my skin. Wake up in the cold of the lilac daw, race in the butchering tempests and always hold my breath in the ecstasy of the dark. Seraphic is the nectarine of wisterias, cycles of intoxication and money that aids this opulent existence. The gleam of champagne, glistening bonnet. A phaeton for the fair colleens adamant to heist the royal palace. Wealth.

Home is an orchard of rotting memories.

Clay, nourishing and selfless, mushes my neck during the tempestuous nights and lulls me to pretty sleep. She made me. Loves me. Homes me. Soils the berries of rapture and blooms this perfect family. Her bronzed face in front of the oven, praying for the cake to ferment, the whip of her pulpous hands pummeling my lower lip carmine is Home. The breathless embrace, when I arrived late, annihilating my senses is Home. Home is the nights spent on my fuschia bed numbly staring at the moon. Perfectly cratered, artwork of a great sculptor. Home.

It is to wish this heart would stop beating. It is to hope somebody, anybody would walk in, break this harrowing silence and hold my broken fragments in their arms. Home is in the beauty of destruction. And solving puzzles wrong. And splattering black on this picturesque family portrait. It is to keep swimming when all my mortal synapses tell me to stop.

How often do we not notice the algae? The stagnation in our lives, the grime that infiltrates the shallow pedestal of this pond with schmaltzy gore.

An olive shadow streamed in through my windows. My feet led me toward water. The stairs merged together, bubbles of afternoon light diffusing my retinas, my feet fumbled. My kinesthetic control was slipping, the floor was an ice-ring. The milk was rotting, unwashed dishes, jalapeno pizzas and spoiled white wine. Glass shatters.

We are frescoes of unsung fables, glued together by gold. Stained glass windows only reflect the red and yellows outside while we drown in the seas of purples and blues inside. We feed on carbon dioxide and forget the ebb of time when this home turned into a torture chamber.

Juniper green expanse of muskgrass suffocated the chasmic trenches of this pond. Shades of black, the water compressing my skin, crushing my neurons. It is a heady feeling, discovering the forbidden cavities of my home. To swim to the point of no return. The wisterias now corrode my skin, it's nectarine venomous,and the carnival of light afloat on the surface leads me astray. There is no shore. My home is endless and when I swim out of this pond drenched, its walls have calligraphed skin and the word home has inked my arteries blue.

Home is in the euphoria. The barbecues that we barbecue for dinner, the physics numerical no one has an answer to, the awkward happy birthdays while cutting the raspberry cake I am pretty sure nobody ate or just the disastrous chocolate walnut baklava in family baking sessions. The epiphany in bickering over Monopoly or charades on family game night. Home is in the evanescent whites that are bleached by purple. Lost in the murk of pain. In the cycle of breaking and rebuilding.

Home is in the patterns. The poisonous nectarine of wealth, the cool shade of our roof, the sunkissed ripples of prestige and glory, the suffocating algae that paints me blue. Or it is going beyond the superficial layer of algae. Discovering abysmal abysses of the truth. We all are water lilies basking in the beauty of this home while at the same time being adrift in its messed up web.