I WAS, AND I AM

All this happened in a crowded room.

I raise my beleaguered hands, palms up this time, and the earth shakes and roars. Uprooted, and soil and sand, and I was.

The land, my sinking island, exhumed, opens, and the torrent glows, and diamonds litter my path. Glittering and dazzling and refracting, I keep to my prideful eyes, abandon, and I was.

And like that, it was done, drawn down, a nocturnal shade, a reckoning, a derelict sun. Dissolving, I pick through the fallout, the baubles, the trinkets, the carnival glass, blind, and I was.

Where to now? A crucial question; no answer.

My ill-fitting travel attire is wholly appropriate for this occasion, this forsaken station, and I am.

An asp hisses and the wind blows indifferent, gritty embraces. I raise my hands again. Palms up, pleading, a bit of bleeding, and I was.

And nothing but quiet and blight, the reply, a voiceless choir, death in the rafters, wingless flight. The earth is stone, and I go to ground, adjust, accept, and I was.

Mountainous, my tomb is now monotonous, ponderous. The rain skitters, runs, predictably so, a reminder that sated men drown in slight puddles every day, and I was.

An infinite desert hurricane whips, agitates, again blinding, binding, buckling. My streaking sky is shattering cut-glass, a slicing cutlass.

The poverty of severed treasure divides me cleanly, and on my knees, my inheritance is split between two worlds, and I am.