Disasters

Some things are more fantastical in writing with an innate editor who watches the lines to cry – foul.

To write with some distain is to afford the author’s lot.

If you want to know what it is like going through a major disaster imagine what it is like staring out from a life size dryer window as it is spinning slow. Nothing is ground. Nothing makes sense for a long time, not even to your own senses.

And the story doesn’t come out neatly folded and stored in days or events. Because time shatters and falls into two piles, what destroys and what saves. And from then on there’s a clinging to every soft and rounded thing that shapes us by the ability to hold it rather than our bleed.

There’s no way to embody it. It is alive and it is dead and the pen loses track.

And those who knew you no longer fully do. It’s just, you would never tell them that. You save that for yourself to enjoy the comfort of some preservation.

Dragon

There is a blanket over the window, some divorcees tend to postpone décor. Still, it’s a place where the world keeps pace with silence to listen to my thoughts. Sometimes he is a bastard, he who sleeps on the couch every night after the alcohol placates him. Sometimes he is kind and considerate. I always lock the door to my room without further endeavor until morning.

A horizontal sliver running across the top of a dirty window will shout morning’s arrival. Yet it is dark, too dark for the hour. Since moving to California I had longed for a good thunderstorm but this isn’t it. And then there’s that moment where logic ebbs across the senses and you know something isn’t right.

I walk out into the kitchen and it is black. No traffic, no noise, just a quiet calm. He’s snoring on the couch. Avoiding him until around noon is usually the best game plan. I carefully step out of the grouch zone onto the front porch. For the first time I see its mouth, smell its breath. This is when I realize the air is slowly suffocating.

Wake up bastard, wake up…we have to go.

.

The dragon is black,

who can define its

skin?

We drove nostrils of black.

The loins were black.

The eyes were black.

No one asked which part was which

it moved, that’s all.

.

It fueled its own sun

with a fury too great,

only chimneys were left

to stand in rubble.

.

The dragon is black,

a cape of desertion.

Orange lips

orange tongue

yellow teeth

no one asked what it said

we heard it, that’s all.

.

And people in far away lands

will tell of fire

all else a mythological tenor

without flesh.

.