Robert Frost Was Wrong

-home is not home because 'when you go there
they have to accept you, they have to take you in'.
Too many folks outgrow where they once
were obliged to live, and can't shrink themselves
back into those old spaces for that to be true.
For many a front door they can rent
to keep the world at bay would be the best
but in the absence of that, a quiet hostel
with thick walls between rooms would fine
-for a while at least. Somewhere to go
where they can leave unstained by any judgement
pressed into their character by the owner.
Where as for many in this 'home owning 'democracy''
home is where the damnation starts, and it continues ever after.

Hubris Heights, As Seen From Below

Often, when young, I was told 'know your place'
by the people who owned the physical space
I was forced to exist in.
As their property I went where they wanted me.
What I misunderstood in the past, and see now,
is how my instructors were talking not about the ground  I took up,
but about my lack of social class, my zero status.
As a child I had no value, therefore no place around them.
Even though they were my, yes my, parents.

I was their adjunct, and as an adjunct
I was to be talked at, without being heard.
At the time I thought that I was being addressed,
albeit incoherently, and therefore I had value.
I was blind to how I was unesteemed.

Now I can count that lack of sight as a blessing,
as a life my past felt like a very hard very long falling down.
Had I seen and known in full how I was actively devalued
sooner than I did, it would have hurt much, much, more.

Things are better now. If I am to be the object of derision
I know it is better to honestly deride myself for my limits,
before my tormentors begin, and to be firmer with myself
than my tormentors could ever know how to be with me.
That is the power of Self Knowledge in action.
It stops me passively absorbing other peoples cheap anger .