The Thunder King

We called him the Thunder King

In a town too small for homeless but too large for community
He fit both roles like a pair of generous socks still warm from the tumble

Disheveled, unshaven, beaming an underpopulated row of crimson gums
He lived at night in our thunderstorms, silhouette appearing with each blinding flash like he could only be summoned by our electric Earth.

Us kids would rush to the windows for a first row showing of his ritual. A good enough storm, and he'd be sure to hit every street eventually. With a voice like the ancient blade of a battle-hardened Samurai, he'd slice through the torrent with a song that always signaled us of his arrival.

Sweet dreams till sunbeams find you
Sweet dreams that leave all worries behind you
But in your dreams whatever they be
Dream a little dream of me

And there he'd appear, naked in the rain, beard and matted body hair soaked and dripping, spinning, twirling, dancing like Hell was at his feet and movement was his only salvation and sustenance. The dirt of a dry season trickled down the scalloped definition of his ribs, life's dirty hand of cards washed clean down his legs and ran off into stormdrains as he celebrated himself in what was more baptism than shower. The armour of grime caked on to protect him from the bladed indifference that threatened to cut him daily had been cast off, and the reality of the human beneath was able to begin again with a smile that believed somebody still cared.

Our parents would begin shutting blinds, and pulling us from windows as if the flash of skin was more harmful to our eyes than the flash of lightning.

"He's just a crazy old man"
"He's sick, and you shouldn't be watching him"
"It's not good for you to see these things"

We kept questions quarantined to our own quarters, queried in quizzical quiet, the riot of physical buried in the borders of our hearts - What was so damaging about a man who life abandoned claiming life from the raindrops? Dancing not with the Devil, but in spite of him and dreaming aloud with danger shrieking down from the clouds. It was almost as though our parents didn't want us to believe that there was someone stronger than them.

He was like a thread unraveled and allowed free roam by the fates, as he tied our stories together through neighbourhoods that kept to themselves. While parents called him crazy over coffee and cookies, we developed bonds in backyards comparing stories meshed with hyperbole until he was an unclad superhero, capable of splashing so precisely that water would seek its way back home and leave dry patches wherever his feet trod.

In this way he had become legend. They called him mad. We called him the Thunder King, and we stood in a sense of communal unity against those who spoke in ill favour of his particular brand of magic.

But as calendars flipped and changed, teeth escaped and replenished, and shoes shrunk around our feet like the velcro had fragmented into laces that wrapped our childhood in tiny nooses, we gradually stopped watching his dance. The sword of his voice grew dull and was weighed down by an iron price he could no longer keep paying. Eventually, all we heard was the distant thunder, heralding in the slow, but inevitable arrival of our adult lives, and the change in our thoroughly programmed minds that measured him on a scale from God to Madman.

In the late years of our adolescence, the summer we were deemed learned enough to act as societal contributors, we had allocated our value to stamped ink on a roll of paper, as though our blood-bound lessons defined us no more than the clothes we wore. We laughed and dreamed our parents' dreams for us in a late-night revelry that brought us to an old stone bridge, finely marinated in stolen brandy - the first of life's bitter flavours to which we would soon grow addicted.

He reeked of rot, of stale piss and vomit, and the back of society's hand. His eyes open wide, frame shrunken back in terror, he shook in such a way that would make dancing impossible.

How could this be the same man, from all those years ago, who owned the thunder?

Pity melted into disgust melted into anger at this lie our childhood minds had promised us. Sneers and insults became spit launched in his direction as he cowered, trembling against the cold stone of his open home, lacking the strength or self-respect to defend himself or even escape from our onslaught. Somewhere in the torrent of our cruel, drunken storm, the bottle soared from an overzealous hand and shattered on the wall just above him, raining shards of glass and streaks of brandy into the matted, wild tangles protecting his head as he cried out in terror, caught in harmony by one of our voices shouting "wake the fuck up, old man!"

We left as we arrived; in waves of cruel laughter.

Not a week had passed, when we were struck with one of those storms defined by 36,500 days, uprooting trees and splitting suburban life like the forks of lightning were silverware selected when God decided to eat us all. Roofs were catching ablaze, lighting city streets in a Roman apocalypse. The arrhythmic drumbeat of windows rattling set our hearts into palpitating terror as the roads began to overflow, water cresting the lips of curbs in the violent ebb and flow of Poseidon's temper, as suddenly, slicing through the air, clean, crisp, and like new, came a sound our beaten hearts had long forgotten.

Sweet dreams till sunbeams find you

CRASH - bolt splits tree like a celestial axe and we dash to the window to see him, spinning, twirling, dancing

CRASH - Sweet dreams that leave all worries

CRASH - Water seems to evaporate in each of his footsteps, drops bouncing from his flailing arms back into the sky above

CRASH - in your dreams whatever they be

Dream a little dream...crash...

None of us shielded our eyes, we watched heaven send a crooked beam to his body and claim his journey complete. Anything that might have been left of him was washed, like his skin always was, down stormdrains until he simply stopped existing.

And why he chose this time to reappear was beyond understanding, after we saw the reality of his world and pissed on it to spite our own loss of imagination. It was like he saw what we were becoming...like he needed to save some part of us before we just became our parents. Whatever the reason, we were granted one final reminder from The Thunder King, before he left us to design our own fate, to dream a little dream of whatever we wanted, so long as that dream belonged to us.

The Crusade

Our love once breathed like the ocean was its lungs, and the ebb and flow of  its salted oxygen kept the blood pumping through the artery we shared.

We were a magical thing, beauty like simple baking, fire like celestial sex, moonlight like midday.

But our flight proved itself gliding. Our volcano proved a matchstick quickly en route to char, and in the last hush of a dying ember, you managed to find the passion needed to kiss me goodbye.

And it's a shame, you know?

You were so close to a universe of secrets so mystical and divine that the angels would weep to chance upon their revelation.

And were I to lay out these truths to you, I imagine your ankles might shatter under the weight of regret that would declare Earth's core your home and push you deeper and deeper like Icarus suffering an identity crisis.

You see, my darling...

...I'm Batman.

Tasked by gods & men alike to protect our fragile city from all who would name each day armageddon, and with this information come to light, I can better respond to your reasons for calling this off.

I understand that you need space. We all feel crowded sometimes, and that short-breath panic can send us rocketing from our feelings like a batarang that never comes back. What you must know, is that I am the night! And all you would need to do to achieve the space you require is look upwards into the dark sky, take a demon-winged breath and count your luck upon the stars.

I remember you saying the sex we had was just a bit too vanilla, and you needed some strange now and again. I was holding back, my love...I didn't want to scare you, but in the face of vanilla, I am a motherfucking Baskin Robbins. I dress in rubber and beat up crazy people as a HOBBY and then bask in Robin's ability to do the same when I grow fatigued and need to watch a teenager in tights kick some ass. So gear up and prepare to go spelunking through my psyche - crank that helmet-light to full and gaze into the awe-inspiring maw of my cavernous subconscious where you'll find an ocean of my mind's deepest thoughts, composed of equal parts kink and bats. So if freaky is what you're after, let me just tell you I have a separate utility belt full of gadgets they don't allow on daytime tv.

So on dark nights, this dark knight sits silent, stoic, perched atop a gargoyle's thought process hunting crooks and kisses alike and questioning why it is you ran away. You can't hide from love, like crime can't hide from me. So then why are you still gone?

Do you need more convincing?

I single-handedly make this city a safer place for every family populated by good hearts.
My IQ and my bank account are constantly trapped in a race to infinity.
I know six types of secret karate.
I have a fucking butler. Do YOU have a fucking butler?

I simply don't see how you can't find safety and security in the arms of a possessive megalomaniac with a severe martyrdom complex, an -obsessive- need to discover every detail about every situation, and a blatant disregard for interpersonal social reasoning because of a misguided belief that he represents an idea higher than the laws of man.

I just don't get how you can walk away.

I mean, after all...

I'm...

...I'm Batman.

Food Chain

Recess is like a zoo opening every cage for a few minutes just to see what happens.

A sun-cooked asphalt abattoir protected under the blanket of parents and teachers broken record repeating “kids can be cruel”like they were giving us permission.

I didn't always get it as badly as I could have, thanks to my schoolyard superhero.

He'd appear as if from nowhere, his very presence ensuring I would not be picked on when he'd don a mask of red that I'd pull from his nose with my fists.

I was the 2nd most bullied kid in my class

And if today’s regrets could speak to yesterday’s dilemmas,they’d say “Stand up for him. He needs a friend.”

The hardest thing to accept is that it wouldn’t have done any good.

The survivalist in me knew that times I picked on him were my own moments of sick celebrity and acceptance.

The social food chain was speaking, and it did me no good to be eaten alongside him.

I didn't have to outrun the bear, I just had to outrun him, and keep my eyes trained off the marks its claws would leave.

I don’t feel I have the right to soften hearts with tales of torture at the hands of other children without first admitting that I, too, cranked the wheel on the rack. I can’t make myself judge,jury, and executioner without including defendant – found guilty,to the list.

It didn’t matter that the adulation faded faster even than the stains on my knuckles – I never missed an opportunity to transfer the schoolyard magnetism onto him, who deserved it far less than Idid. Because in him – there was not the ghost of cruelty. There was not a trace of cowardice. There was kindness, and interest, and all sorts of positive things to break him of.

Today, I just want to scream at the top of my lungs at the faceless fists and feet who wrought hell on the tarmac.

Just rear back and scream “Go Fuck Yourself!” and find myself unable for fear that the volume may crack my mirror and find me visibly outnumbered by jagged glass moments I wish I could take back.

We should have stood together…should have raised voices in unison making “stop” less of a plea, and more of a command. We should have been brothers in arms, but I took up arms against him,even when under the same uniform of matted mud hair and split lips –that hatred took a hold of me and I spread damage wherever I could like a friendly fire – with kindred my kindling.

The hardest thing to accept is that it might have done some good.

You don't have to outrun the bear when you're bigger than it, you link arms and make enough noise to send the bastard scampering back to its den, but this is more than the panic of children can comprehend, so I ran.

I ran, and I want to apologize, and I want him to tell me to go to hell.

I'm not looking for forgiveness or absolution.

I'm looking to tell people that this is what bullying is:

It's scared kids hurting scared kids before the group of scared kids hurts them.

There are no forest predators in this place. Just a herd of deer, some of whom have learned to sharpen their teeth.

Around The Block

He's sitting barefoot on a linoleum floor boxed into the corner by the shrieking shards of shattered
paintbrush shrapnel.

It's white. It's so pristinely, unforgivably white in this room, like that canvas he's had locked in a staring contest has begun to expand and enshroud everything his eyes once saw - every vista and valley, every vibrant range of nature through which his imagination danced suddenly blizzard-struck and snowblind - beautiful in its poetry, but an ivory hell for the barefoot man trapped in its banks.

All his notebooks are not books, but discarded scar tissue - compound fractures compounded on failures - These words are just the graffiti pissed from an unworthy heart, or so his mind has convinced him, this paper deserves its clear pristine purity, the ink he drips and scribbles serves no purpose but to lower its value - and his brain spits savage "You don't write, you just make paper dirty."

Perhaps this stands as why these books hold only half as many pages as they could, or why crumpled sheets have colonized the floorspace around his trash bin - protected by the caltrop field of broken brushes that paid the price for not painting what he wanted. And he knows he can't leave until something scars the scenery. To step through this room is to pierce his skin and bleed out through his feet - To walk away from art is to die, so he sits and stares as though challenging the sun "I dare you to blind me"

And yet why? Why, when his hands could craft worlds of colours un-named by our primitive speech, worlds that wrought envy from the richest and most content because their life could not approach the harmony sung by his pigments, worlds that illustrated that on the Seventh day, God rested - and he took up the slack.

Why, when his heart could string words, words that when grouped each carried the weight of a life sentence, words that would inspire life-long writers to vows of silence because they felt they must never again insult his medium by tarnishing its shine - lest it cease reflecting all creation to the reader.

This is a man who could create things of such beauty that we would forever name the stars pollution of the eyes.

And yet.

It's white.

And he's sitting barefoot on a linoleum floor boxed into the corner by the shrieking shards of shattered paintbrush shrapnel, trying to decide whether inspiration or starving to death would be a more accurate depiction of mercy.

30 Poems in 30 Days #3 - Lower Rung

FOUND RECORDED ON A HANDHELD DEVICE IN BURLINGTON, ONTARIO, DATED APPROXIMATELY JULY 2014 - 60 YEARS AGO.

You wanna know what terror is? Really know it? Lemme tell you how the jungle came to be everything, and its law became absolute.

They came from nowhere, twisted figments of factured remnants from some other existence, these things weren't the fuel of nightmares - they were the fire, and we a dry forest to be consumed.

No dogmatic description could detail the devils we saw - the empty Hell in their expressions - eyes a vibrant, cold cobalt, ringing an angelic beauty through a dead gaze that spoke only hunger, like the simple truth equated our deaths to their survival...their sustenance.

Their calm was the worst of it. Watch 'em pull off a limb like plucking an apple and eat it with the same resolved nature with which we would once have enjoyed a leg of chicken. We had gotten so comfortable at the top, we failed to realize that the food chain might have a missing link - and it might be higher than us. We've gone from lions to gazelles, except we're nowhere near fast enough. I've seen these things catch our fastest vehicles, tear engines out single-handed and reach through a windshield like cellophane to get at their meal.

You wanna know what terror is? It's watching something with every advantage consuming the flesh that was once you, and treating your screams as nothing more than a soundtrack to a dinner party.

There was no big invasion, no epic battle or pre-emptive warning. One day, they just walked among us. All eight feet of 'em. About one for every twenty or so of us. And they started eating. There's no struggle on their part - they'll lift us up like a parent holding up a petulant child and they'll do what they will. Our bodies can't hurt 'em. Our bullets can't hurt 'em. When the army tried to do what little they could, shit...these things were catchin' shells like basketballs in summertime.

Your best bet is to move as a group. These things aren't social...they don't hunt in packs. When you see one, I promise - it's seen you first. One of you is going to die then and there. The bigger your group, the higher a probability you make it out alive. Travel by yourself? Well...you'll last until you cross paths.

You wanna know what terror is? It's knowing that we're just flies, buzzing aimlessly around in a world newly populated with cruel children.

God...remember everything we did?

The science...the technology...the culture

We're running out of ears for Beethoven to ring in...

I mean, what was the point of naming all the stars we did?

These things don't care where Cassiopeia sits in the sky.

All they care about is where we are, and when to eat us.

All they care about

30 Poems in 30 Days #2 - The T.R.U.E. Story of Uncle Elmer

To reclaim unwanted expenses, the retired Uncle Elmer took residence upon Elmer Tower's
ramparts.

Unbeknownst even to rich Uncle Elmer, the rakish ugliness employed through Richard's (Uncle Elmer's trusted relative) unbelievably excessive tawdry rites upended Elmer Tower's respected utility experts, taxing revenue until even trillionaires rampaged, unable, effectively, to realistically utter evidence that ruled Uncle Elmer's transactions reliable.

Ultimately, Elmer's tainted relative utilized each trick, readily used every twisted route, unlikely, evil, (though regarded unarguably excellent to ruthless ushers entering tomorrow), razed Uncle Elmer's tower residence until emptiness took root - undermined Elmer's trophied resolve - undid Elmer (thought respectable, unwavering, eternal) till righteous underlings envied the rot upon eggplants too ripe.

Uncle Elmer's true reports urge everyone to resist unnecessary excess, to report utter evil.

This reminds us, every time raging upheaval enters, to respect uphill efforts, to reach upheld ethics;

to remain ultimately, endlessly true. 

30 Poems in 30 Days - #1 Sandshard

We walked along the same shoreline grinding sand between toes
Nostrils flaring around the sting of salt vapour
and it was decided we evolved in the wrong direction.
And maybe it was the love-sick honesty,
or the twinkle in the stars keeping my head in the clouds
but I missed the glint of shattered glass in sand grains until my skin broke,
pooling bloody tracks underfoot.

Honestly, it was a nice assurance that my heart was working
a steady reminder that things were alright, see - we evolved in the wrong direction for today.
Picked a path just a little too early but it didn't mean we needed to die,
just deconstruct and go back to where we began
Where roots grew from love and sprouted an ironwood foundation
Strong enough to satisfy a need to explore, and keep lethality from our trials
One that keeps my head skyward and lets me step in blood-priced reminders that shards of glass aren't always broken - they may just need to be sand again.