I’m imagining a man at a bar sitting side-by-side with a perfectly still tornado. Just wisps of white wind and debris in spirals circling their way to the ceiling.
Unfashionably dressed, with his plain blue collared shirt tucked – front, back, and waist – into his jeans. He’s leaned over the bar, can cupped in his focused hands, and singing. Quietly, to begin with. His throat is extended, his Adam’s apple exposed with a jagged triangle bursting from the skin covered in stubbly black hair and the odd white. He’s singing a simple song, as if he were just talking, just getting it out. His ears twitch when he says, “You. You grow like tornado. You grow from the inside. Destroy everything through. Destroy from the inside.” And the bartender unlatches the locked stained-glass window, to let some of the night in after a long day, and the breeze comes sifting in through the bare legs and soaked ankles on the barroom floor. And the breeze creeps and crawls and finds the wisps of white wind spirals at the counter. And the spirals start to spin, when the creeping breeze touches them.
“You sound so blue. You now are gloom.” This breeze, once gentle, comes forcefully now from the roaring quiet of the outer-city avenue. And the jackets come quickly from the shoulders of the chairs and wrap around the prettiest, most slender waists first. And the tornado spins spins spins spins. And the glasses fall from the counter top, shattering on the barroom floor, against the dried drink from the night before, so the shards glowing like crystals in the dim light scatter like marbles on uneven ground.
His throat now shaking free from the vines of skin and muscle and bone splits veins that wrap around the revolving winds beside him and this mix of wind and odd chunks of dirt and blood is tearing from him this voice altogether brash and subtle and blinding. “YOU. YOU GROW, YOU ROAR. ALTHOUGH DISGUISED, I KNOW YOU.” And his lungs come strangled by the winds, the two of them shriveled and purple and floating in the middle. His heart, like a pendulum swinging by a thousand strings of gold, comes next. It swivels on an invisible axis. And the chairs and stools come crashing down around this man and this tornado, beating like mad-men on newly-bought drums while the glass clinks and clangs and this man sings to twisted tornado from tightened tongue. [Go.]
