STORM CHASER

It wasn't the rain , or the breeze,
or the fact that her organs
felt like they were on the out side
that made her stop.
It was the light.
It trickled down through
the spindly tree fingers
and cast a cobweb of black onto her face.
The light.
It was cold light.
White blue grey light that was heavy in the air
as she huddled under this giant fairy tale tree
to hide from the storm.
The outside storm that is,
not the storm in her head.
She never hid from that.
That she embraced with warm wooden arms
that splintered and chipped.

It wasn't the first time this had happened,
it may not be the last
but it was another time
and she didn't see why deserved another time.
So she never ran from the storm in her head
but they did.
They cowered from it,
shuddered and shook in its wake.
Instead of trying to weather it,
to harness it,
to just brace themselves against the coming winds
they all fell to the shelters and storm drains
that soon became her past.

But you see,
she was bigger than small boys in all weather clothing.
She was bigger than tiny men in flimsy boots
that hid and shook.
She was bigger than most.
She was lightening  just searching for her thunder.

TATTERED

They dragged from her. Strange half words in breathless icy syllables.  Sharp sounds that fell on soft mushy ears.

Fumbled and tumbled and crashing from her junk brain, her trash mouth, her fat tongue. Her lips, too thick for her mouth to tell her story.

The police woman hands her a hot thing. Hard, and hot, too hot. “Cup”, she says, “Of tea”, she says. Words are fractured. Thoughts tattered. Body torn.

She tries to tell the tale of her fall from grace. Her push from grace. Her shove from grace. The theft of her grace. She tries to force the words out through slick teeth past metal fillings and into the air.

She sits on a chair that hurts her creaky rigid bones. Snapping bones. Brittle icy battered bones.

This room is full of strangers, foreign to her, she doesn’t speak their language, or she does she just forgets how.

She remembers to try and push the words out again but her fettered breath hangs limp in the air as strange eyes and strange hands draw their own conclusions.

There is no comfort here, in this bare room of hard walls and soft people. No comfort. Except for inside the hard and hot. Hard and hot and really there. A cup, she said, of tea she said.

It seems there is always comfort to be found, at the bottom of a hot drink. 

CIMERII

Have you ever laid in bed at night

Eyes heavy with the weight of the day

And tried to sleep

Really sleep

But nothing will quiet the incessant rushing

And whirring of the world at full spin.

The pulse of the vacant throng of your room, your bed.

You close your eyes to a cacophony of internal noises

BABUM! BABUM! BABUM!

Your heart beats out of rhythm with the rest of the human race

You blink a sand storm into your brain

Winds howl and rain pounds

And you lie there

Eyes scrunched up to the night

You lie there and think,

Why is this emptiness so loud?

Why are my bones creaking and my heart

Heavy and loud as steel?

Why can’t I just sleep?

You are weighty and slumping into the chasm

The gap in consciousness, in knowing.

And tomorrow is just a flicker of an eyelid away,

It always never more than a flicker away

And you drift

Down

Deep

Underneath a blanket of Cimmerian shade.