Matthew James Barton

Hard Home To Call Home

Sometimes going home is hard.

What waits for you I wonder?


A wife, girlfriend, boyfriend, brother, a lover, sister, stranger, mother. An illness, stillness, a still seated congress. A silence, untenable, a wrongness, congenital.


You leave behind a chosen flock to sit with your given sheep, anchors tie you to a block and the wounds they leave run deep.

The ones you leave behind don't know, and why should they, it's your lot. They leave with laugh and joke and song, but you already feel the rot.


At home is where the best and worst of everyone is shown. I could have- should have been a bird, when old enough, just flown. But memories are fonder now and my bitterness aside, my life and purpose are my own; and I alone decide.