Something is hovering over the atmosphere. It fills my sky with a smoke that shapes boulders over the sunlight and eats away security like fresh lava on a baby’s flesh. Life’s sureness is dissipated, and a queerness has entered my lungs. I can’t tell yet what lies in the hidden folds of this new oddity, but I feel it ebbing into my mind in the form of a question. Four letters brand their steaming selves onto the meat of my brain, and all I see is, “WHAT?” This word leaked its juices down into my chest, so now I feel the question; the insecurity; the shadow. I sense the presence as its every movement causes ghastly substances to brush against my nerves and rattle my rib cage. I start as it licks the oxygen around my panting lungs, tasting the frantic air eroding my functionality. It revels in my uncertainty. Something is changing in the atmosphere. I can feel it all around me and inside as gripping tendrils of confusion wrap around my small, orderly world. Unsure I am of its intentions, but sure am I of its progression. It wants to overtake me. It longs to wrench from me a life devoid of painful goodbyes. Oh, how it torments my wandering eyes! They search the currents for the wave of brutality about to fall upon them! Yet all they see is their small, orderly world, and a whisper of its soon to come oblivion. My world, filled with the exertions of a small, but strong willed being, who toils on even in the midst of obvious futility. Everything I know and love, will change. I can see it now- the wave of bloodied colors swirling beyond my reach, ready to ensnare me in a powerful blast of hate. I can hear it, as its mile high winds breathe destruction with a vile, putrid breath that suffocates the plants and rips out their lungs from their rooted homes, discarding any hope of freedom or fresh air. It steals from us our power and agility; the very essence which makes us mobile it snaps up with its gnawing contempt in its crave for ferocity.


Oh, you muddied flag, you swirling hole of misery,
Bring not your whistling tune of conversation, nor your conniving strokes of broken repair.
I want you far from here, oh deliverer of sorrow,
I want you diminished.
Leave my home, leave my peace,
Let me lie here, in rest and ease.
Take your storms from here far away,
Bring them back not now, nor before, nor even through delay.

I wish you dead, I wish you at peace.
I wish you would cease into a rest of enveloping sleep.
I take from you your mobility,
I steal away thy force!
You shall not overcome me, you devilish, brutish destroyer of course.
You desire in your nonexistent soul the fumes of chaos,
The leaking tears of red hot coal.
Together they mix to make your stench
Reach far and wide,
Enveloping all and many who are untasted in defeated pride.
Away you swirl,
Round and round you chase,
Circling those who you hunger to haste
To death they go from lore to doom,
and in your center they expire with their last, “Ha-rooom.”

Goodbye, my friend! Adieu to you!
Wrong was your fate, and soon, so soon!
But though your life ended, be also at peace,
For still I might join you in the pit of this man eating feast.
For it hunts me down, too.
Oh yes, it tracks my scent.
And it craves my destruction more than it hungered for you,
So perhaps you will receive a companion whose
State of form, so gnawed and chewed,
Will make you agree
That an end like yours is something to envy.

Yet for now the tempest grows;
The hope I had seems a small, withered rose.
I look to the revolving skies,
And on my mind burns the word WHY?
Did this storm of change
Happen to find
Me and my small, orderly world?