Homecoming

The scent of your neck/rough musk:man/coming home at last. Leather coat draping over your muscular frame, as you drop your stuff on the floor:a pause as I look at your face, taken aback by the beauty/how gorgeous you are:how you went from the boy who I fell in love with, to the man you are today and I stop what I’m doing and I approach you, afraid as to what I may find/hoping and praying to God that the man who greets me at the door and whom I approach, is the man who left me ten months ago.

As you hug me you shove me to the wall/pinning me up against it/looking into your eyes I see a face so serious/eyes which have seen the worst of tragedies and horrors come to life, and I free a hand - not easily from your muscular grip - and reach up on my tip toes to ruffle your hair and you grin at me: a sheep in wolfs clothing/you play tough with the other boys:with me you just play rough, as you put one hand behind my head and move in.

My mouth a willing receipient, opens willingly as your big paws cradle my head and then slip down my thin frame to my hips and you breathe the air from within me into you and as we share each others breathe I feel your stubble rubbing gently on my face:a sensation so missed/as our lips let go and our hips get ever closer, I lay my head gently on your muscular chest and breathe in the smell that I’ve missed for too long:too many months past with your pillow untouched/by either you or myself/and it sits the same way it did the day you left, unchanged, so I could smell you as I went to bed each night and held myself as I went to sleep and as my marine returns home from the ravages of war where no on can be a winner/in a war on a word taken out and inflicted on a people, I breathe a sigh of relief because I can finally stop writing letters under my assumed name of Ms. using my friends address/don’t ask:don’t tell:don’t get dismissed.

As I start to cry, you put a finger under my eye and brush away the tears that form as you kneel down and bring your frame/so in contrast from mine/down to my level and look me in the eye as you pick me up and put me over your shoulder and we make our way to the bedroom where I can finally smell you and hold you again/this time in the flesh.

Home at last.