Whether storms are all numbered, counted, and expelled from heaven's manufacture as sensational, furious strands of wind and rain, who can say? As they arrive, however, it is nonetheless clear that they arrive as effects to sets of circumstances.

I sat up straight as an arrow, freshly awakened from a stirring dream of madness as the latest one arrived, watching the black clouds like mighty arms, struggling and arguing against the trees outside my bedroom window. I had been torn by an invisible hand clutching me by the throat, snatching me from the murk of an ephemeral bedroom.

Engulfed in unsatiated fear, powerless to convulse even the tiniest flesh patch or creak a bone, my body was wrapped in only a gray silken **** cloth. As I lay awake, speechless, thunderbolts cracked.

As I was rendered helpless to petrification, I was surrounded by strike after strike, a confounding series of white bolts striking seven times in each place, following a path of concentric circles around my small bed.

I struggled to move, feeling a moving static across my body like jellyfish stings from the top of my head to the soles of my feet, as I felt the cold chill from each bolt setting my face into a freezing strangulation.

I was pulled away. I faded away from the smoking holes surrounding the bed, the sub-zero chill outside and the torturous heat of fear and arrhythmia pumping spews and spurts through my arteries inside, and I was left to wander in my own fantasia as I stared up to the ceiling above me in my real bed, daydreaming of its meaning in epistomological fashion.

E---------------------------7---10---12---15---17----t 22h 20v
B-------------------------8----------------------------------­-------
G-----------------------9 -------------------------------------------
D--------------------­9 -----------------------------------------------
A-----------7 7 7 7 -----------------------------------------------------
E--- 0 2 3---------------------------------------------------------------

The intraveneous needles pumped their black liquids, and I could feel my eyeballs bulging completely, pathetically to their limits as I extrapolated from the tantalum-covered machine the lifeforce I knew I needed.

"You can not breathe here," they always told me before I took my journal past the archway, and I was as good as dead if...

It was always if. If the machine broke down, if the communications were broken, if the moon didn't turn half-way just right at the given time.

There was a solid thought, though, a recurring idea.

"If you make it to Otherside, they're going to call you by name and recognize you. If you make it to Otherside, your cover will be blown," I kept hearing a voice call to me.

The evanescence of a light beam constructed inside Emilia's longing, desolate eyes as she searched her room for the pounding rhythm of a distance drum. The succinct stirring shot a severe ache into her eardrums, and she cradled her head inside her lanky forearms, comfortable in their cataclysm.

She had been stolen, and her arms were her only comfort. As she watched onward in the tiny, centipede-infested room she had been thrown into, the beating drums continued, and she could hear the unclear voices of large Ukrainian men prattling about "the beginning."

The beginning, she felt, had begun, whatever it was, and as she listened, the only thing she could think about was cutting those ropes loose and taking control again over these infuriating defectors as her birthright had dictated.

God willing, I beg, Lord Almighty,
That I am going somewhere.
Somewhere where though I am sitting in crowds of people,
Separate languages, separate everything.

It's my fault.
In it all, I can recall,
It's my fault,
The fruit I have born from the trees I have nurtured.

I am furniture.
Sitting here, moving there,
Placed inside a chair
Feeling electricity as though plugged in.

I am in need of litmus paper;
A wriggling creature indeterminately featured follows,
It does not sit nor stand no feet nor hands just wriggling waving scribbling in goopy slop, no stops
The smell of burning band-aids trailing in its wake.

Savage monstrous floatation above a tile sea,
Its motions are elegantly sick, delightful ****,  
And I think I am thinking I'd like to know what it thinks,
But then, I know I should never truly know.

I am in need of litmus paper.
Is it an acid, base, or an accidental space
Filled, yet out of place, a dogma to my face?
Recurrent in its situation, killed once, but a reactivation?

I am in need of litmus paper.
Somewhere, I find, I am in the trail it leaves behind.
In this sign, I am afraid.

As it situates, conscious or unconsious,
Wriggling along, regurgitating from behind itself over and over again,
Halving itself, then fusing whole again,
It stares ahead, using an invisible force, inward eyes inside a blank face, to its next traversed inch in the slimy tiles.

And I think,
I need litmus paper.

Love is a thorny branch thrown from the dust,
From mounds and memorials beneath, it was ******.
Some secret, undivulged, it snuck to discovery,
And wound around lungs as a vine  in its revelry.

Some angel with scissors, will she cut the pain of it away,
And throw heavenly breath into me on this day?
Either sword or shield, it morphs to its station,
Manifests and swiftly addresses education.

Lord, help me through, I am blind to its spectacle,
Stabbed vigorously through by love's pangs at the ventricle.
Lord, help me, I am left insecure,
Lift me to stand; please, restore the impure.