Think of Me

Think of Me
The gale, it whips
At this stilted house I’m in
And tears the rails from the porch
The palms play limbo, their heads shot back
By the strength of the fearsome wind

And here in the dark
Of my powerless house
Where the silent air hangs heavy and wet
With no book left unread
And no beer left undrunk
And some Oscar Mayer ham
Floating in the slosh of a cooler
I sit with my bourbon,
Warm and neat,
Listening to the plywood on my windows
Flex and bow in the gusts
And the coconuts plummeting on the tin roof
Like little milk-laden bombs

It sounds like a train,
Everyone says
When a hurricane blows at your house
But to me, it’s more haunting
When the palm fronds slam together
Like a hundred clattering swords
And you hear your home, your life
Creak and moan under the winds
And the sight of the Gulf
Or a salty canal
Slowly consuming your lawn
It’s the false sense of peace,
And that fraudulent calm
As the eye slides over your town
And just when you feel at ease
That’s when it all starts again,
The winds, the rains, the trees thrown about
The waters surging up like the angry Scamander
And all the while I wonder

Faced with the feeling of being stuck
In a place you thought you loved
And realizing that it,
Now dark and hot and silent,
Filled with empty beers and no books left unread,
Offers you nothing but
The terror of being trapped and
A claustrophobic kind of depression
As the humid air draws salty sweat from every pore
And the world outside is blown to ruin
And you, up in Georgia,
Safe from it all...

Part of me hopes that this storm prevails
And drops this house to the ground
They’ll find me there
Alone in the rubble
Surrounded by my beer cans
And all these books
Which can distract me no further
And if you read about that--
About me in a paper--
“Florida man perishes in storm,
Accompanied by all that he drank
And all that he read,”
Would you pity me then?
Or would it simply evoke a strained sigh
And some strange sense of closure?

I know in my heart,
While these winds rip at my walls
And I guzzle my whiskey
And you’re safe and sound,
That you don’t think of me
But part of me, somewhere in here,
Longs to believe that you do