Dragons and Hurricanes

Is pain brilliant or pathetic?  Light shines out absorbing pain in the world, feeling and soaking.  Our pain refracts into prisms of other’s pain feathered and oil slicked hindering flight and then gloriously levitating in empathy.  We are witness to the culture, tiny conversations breathed in silent spaces folding in human origami into creatures presenting geometric structure, but are not this.  We are this energy exchanging, drinking it all like a gape mouthed whale swallowing the ocean.  How sad and tasteless is the salt in time’s ambivalence, daring for this forced numb?

We tease tales from an imaginary clockmaker asking for the hour as if the answer was not always now.  The fissuring eggshell of cuddling with emotional dragons hatched in the calderas of intimacy lost boiling the very essence of what it means to be alone.  The fire of it, the lovely skinless rapture of taking off the body’s netting to be in words alone whisking a bedroom in memory’s strum.  The turnpike opera of bold men and want coming in the timing of earthquakes and hurricanes, present in the mathematics of seasonal appearances reminding one how this ends.  The flood and the rubble, the overturned vehicles in the mud washer churned and set to blaze inside four feet of water, gasoline lapping the tongue. 

Recollecting the named storms and the fault lines, of Saturday nights and grasping at friends and a road trip and the scurrying of three a.m. decision making for a life pivoted to quit living, that the boots to get out on the floor became too heavy, to say you win take her, take the will to want, because complacency of knowing the kiln of the fire is in one’s rib’s cage.  The heat of it consumed the forest long ago, not with longing for a face or a voice, but that any of this was real.  That there was a mirror held up in another being’s green eyes to say I see this too, I see the costumes and the loveliness and the pain bobbing for contact and connection to pray for moments of hum.  Forget you know what the pain is.  Let us hold each other tonight like dragons: enflamed, eternal, enraptured.