Poetry by Paul Barron

                ​Christopher Sessums CC



A Truer Home

No one can know
what brought us here
or how the promise of peace
entered with official papers
to point out our signature.

Life quickens in spirals,
and a fumbled word
within an hour
portions it
to extinction.
Senselessness
takes the quick way down.

What if this moment
is not a door
but a place we return from
a mirror, crystalline,
a facet for every swelling heartbeat
in the palm of our hand
in the handle of a knife,
a transfusion of feet upon the earth
a dream we woke from laughing
though we dreamed our deepest sleep
in the tunnel of a gun.

What if
we made this moment
a destination
from which we returned,
a truer home
lit by flat ground rays of night,
by gravity's daring shale,
by the tread of blood
deliberate
pacing out
its chamber.

​

​
Paul Barron received an MFA in fiction some time ago, and had to let all the wrong reasons to write expose themselves before starting a truer journey and writing poems. The most recent work has appeared in Littoral Magazine and is forthcoming in Kosmos.