The evening stars were gone, replaced
by a spreading, ominous purple bruise of cloud.
When the wind rose, in sudden violent
crisscrossing gusts, everything went into motion.

White cabanas shook, like staked swans
flapping to fly, lavender bushes thrashed
their thorny arms as if in panic, umbrella pines
creaked and writhed like tethered balloons.

Lightning lit the winding, stony stairs, like ornamental
neon lights, as we’d run up the path from the beach.
Shockwaves of thunder accompanied the flashes
- there was no lag - the storm was there and upon us.

We were laughing and screaming, like children
chased through a dark Halloween funhouse.
The first, fat drops of rain popped behind us,
like a giant’s, arrhythmic, snapping fingers.

As we reached the open, French, louvered doors,
that led from our suite down to the shoreline,
we body-slammed them against the tempest.

And braced them fully closed with our backs, as if to vilify the
natural courses of wind and rain with an animal will to break in.

The lashing monsoon heralded our urgent, stormy union.
We were like the storm - insistent, wild and untamed.
All was revealed in that flashing, tempestuous darkness
as need, euphoria and lightning lit the naked night
.
.
A song for this:
Walk Between Raindrops by Donald Fagen
Hurricane Waters by Citizen Cope

I refuse to write anything brilliant today,
in support of the writers’ strike.

There’s a writers’ strike. Should you be writing today?

The algorithm we live in
has become the dumb
nightmare we’ve been given,

a constant flow of concessions,
sad contrivances to survive this
cog in the machine existence.

The fight seems pointless
with only minor bouts of resistance.
If history teaches us anything
it is only labor movements,
those unions that win men
woman and children
any real economic equality.

There won’t be any eulogy
for this lie we call democracy,
while men of prestige and property
have been constantly fighting
against those who bring the lightning
of enlightening insights about this fight.

Shrinking borders while expanding profits,
supporting fascists regimes,
whilst demolishing and reorganizing
governments that try socializing
their own country’s resources.

Our local war mongers
want to rehabilitate
the image that people hate
twist and change the slang,
rework and spin everything
over and over again
as the kings of what is truly Orwellian.

They are so close to destroying
the environment and
every human edifice,
every ounce of progress
in the name of
capitalistic measurements of success.