Home in simplest terms is space:

Warmed by a blanket, breathing, beating, bearing a life

Preserved by frenzied crowd with a ventilator, rusty iron lung, pacemaker, defibrillator

Tenderly embraced pumping its blood within spongy sanguineous bricks

Heart attack in its thirties, but together they kept that secret from it; as it is cultural, one must appreciate

Security when splayed out on splintered hardwood, not another soul within these walls containing

Pipes clogged from second-hand smoke and “but—” good intentions and unappreciated filial piety owed, at night the banging sounds

Like ringing that (however sharp) cannot yet breach the walls and ribs of this sanctum, to protect

So strongly and so carefully, shielded from the elements only to suffocate its inhabitants from within;

Acceptance of these terms is complicity

Denial is imbecility

To be torn in equal parts by the familiar versus familial is the greatest

Tragedy of inhabiting the home erected in the slim space-between .