Your house could be destroyed by an earthquake, a hurricane, a flood, or fire. Yet your home built with good thoughts, kind words, helping hands, and charitable deeds is eternal.

Hussein Dekmak

"Will you leave me then?"
The leaves blew North

"After you fly?"
"After your documents?"
"After our children?"
"After my youth?"
"After my life?"
The leaves flickered in a circle

"When will it be?"
They quickened, spinning, filling the atmospheric pressure

"Please tell me when you do"
A hurricane ceaselessly swallowing all the forests surrounding its vision, carried the world with it, and the sun

As a child I was told to take shelter in a storm.
"Wait for danger to pass, where it's safe and it's warm."
Was the plea sent down wet steps and the outmatched door
To chase my staccato strides.
I'd lose it, if I could help it,
In puddle waves and wind-whipped tides
Over rocky shores and steep divides
Then stroll down the lane with thunderstorms n' hurricanes.
While the sky cracked with tension and the red oaks strained,
I never felt small nor ever afraid,
Of the forceful rumbles their limbs obeyed,
I felt alive n' emboldened by every squall
Raised higher and higher by the climatic cure-all
Until I could meet it face to face n' eye to eye
And hold its gaze, as though it were mine,
Until the blackened-beaten town and the next day's fight
Seemed bold but inviting, a blinding light.

Yesterday, a cloud burst in mythologies
and the rain fidgeted over the retreat

of a tidal pantheon; deities swept away
by a current, and we stood awhile, watching

the moon elbow out the dusk. Breathing
is burdensome when cars float on water

and corpses leak out of cavernous
basements. Every tablet, etched, in the cold

heart of building code was read again
and then again. It wasn't enough to blame

Aeolian whim or the raging riposte of Apollo,
now that we had marvelled away Gaia's

ozone skirt. Her amnion always leaked
in folkloric floods each time she birthed

a parable. She once asked Noah to build
an ark so he could ride her waves

and we scrape the sky to impale her
in shards where her womb is soft and yielding,

as we sour the air and burn the water and strip
her of her emerald sigh and melt her hills

and silt her wetlands. Mostly it was the asphalt
plastering her yearning that calcified her veins

and arteries, as she died slowly under our feet.
We could hardly fathom her sorrow for the tears

rolled off her torso like an oil slick
and rode far into the subway for sewers.

call it hurricane season
every little fluctuation of the weather
makes my mood change quicker

than the flicker of a flame
my emotions run rampant and free
everything on my mind seeks the thrill of fighting

i’m not afraid of consequences
i hate the works of god and the words of men
i am the eye of my own storm and

the time is coming, the winds are changing
let the sea sweep the world to grey
let the earth bow before me and i will say

"your god is a mere bystander to my chaos
your prayers will remain unanswered
and his words will be left unspoken"

keep in mind, i make no empty promises
i will annihilate you, your people, your lands
destroy your everything with my bare hands