Six windows

Wind whips through the six windows
Of this space called 'home'
Simply since my things rest here,
Selectively accumulated and discarded
Over a near-two-years;
Bears the smell of shared suppers in the evenings,
And parting coffees at six a.m., exactly.

And the melancholy Latin rhythms at all hours
Pour from loud-rimmed cars, mingled 
With the angry sirens of trucks ripped 
From county firehouses
Full of men ripped from faked unnervous families
And on their way to settle messes,
Just like smells and music do.

Big city to my east and
Smaller city to my west and
My carefully scrubbed floors and lazy cats
And my collection of books full of half-city dust
Buffer the in-between spaces
Of my attention-deficit-disordered life timeline.

Here I've run for refuge,
Here I've hovered in limbo,
Here I've dampened pillows 
With panic sweat and unbelieving tears,
Finding various outside sources to sustain it
That have cured, disturbed, and captured me till 
I shook them off and moved away
But here have always returned.

Select people come and go,
And go and come,
But always go: the final answer
To the question whether
Home is where another is
As they gaze out my six windows
And comment absently on how 'nice' this is
Before they leave and forget.

Home is a lifelong aspiration that evades
Me usually as I sit and watch 
The many-flavored varieties
Of loosely-unhewn lives pass by 
My sextuplet windowpains;
Alienating when they laugh together,
Reaffirming when they fight together,
Inducing empathy when they scream or cry
In front of one another
And it's clear it would be better
If they did it alone.

Sanctuary -- necessary -- and prison, both
Depending not on itself, but
On the inside of our minds 
Where the real things lie and
The true potential for home is in
Them that fight the cliche that binds:
'Home is where the heart is.'

So where is mine?