It’s near dark
and I will just go home,
light a cigarette
and burn my thoughts.  
I sit on the porch
and watch night fall.
But where is home?
What makes home a home? 

This is exile, I tell myself.
What is exile? 
Memories captured in photographs,
with blue skies and bright smiles. 
It is the absence of my mother’s voice,
the smell of the seashore,
the little dreams we had.    

Where am I? I ask myself.
Am I home? 
I am far from where I belong,
in a city suffocating me
with what is not mine.
Its language exiles me,
imprisons me in the words I try to conjure.
A place where I fear what I see
in my neighbors’ eyes
as I speak my own tongue.

Do they hate me?
Do they hate us?
What crime have I committed?

I wish they knew.
Home is not where you are from;
home is where one belongs,
and I have never belonged.