Electrons soaking into the space between cells

Tonight is an electrifying night. There's lightning everywhere, it's a strobe light outside, but no rain and no thunder. I got so nervous looking at the flashes from Jay's living room, I practically raced out the door, into my car, down the highway and EVERYONE is driving like they're outdistancing the storm faster and faster, bikes speeding past me, speeding up on the turns and yellow lights the rain will come any second and mute this, the wind will raise any minute now, the sound will come and break everything. The music in the car is playing louder, the cigarette smoke is whisked away before I even breathe it out. Break Break Break clouds! Break moon! Break streetlight! Pop!

But it doesn't. We're all pent up, pacing inside our little houses on the lake, twitching inside our skins. The electronics in our bodies, the millions of tiny charged particles which are our thoughts and feelings and bodily functions, ache to be up in the clouds, strain against their cellular prison walls, aware with every other spark tonight of something beyond their unnatural confinement, and we look up at the lights in the sky scared of completely disintegrating but pleading for that confirmation of fate. There's no control in Cleveland tonight. The entire city is about to turn into a pillar of salt. We are doomed.

There is a deconstructed hurricane blowing down America. In South Dakota, winds of 115mph, no tornadoes but roof ripping and root ripping winds. The furnace of hot air pushes east, an advancing army of humidity and misery. Electricity is out across the Midwest, in the Plain states people stand in line, waiting for 20 pound bags of ice from the back of a municipal truck. They search for emergency generators, to turn the fans on. In Mid-Atlantic, the trees dig down as deep as they can. Virginia is set upon by avenging angels of stream and water, that cast deep relief shadows on the billboards and highways...the permanent things are powerless.

photo by David Woodley