The Secret

 


Sometimes I think the idea of death and destruction
is just an excuse to not have to take your own life up in your hands
and toss yourself in the air,
because feeling that free and important is a shock
that’s hard to endure,
 
which kind of makes me wonder
in my inebriated clown sort of way
maybe that tornadoes happen all the time, all around us,
and that a destruction path one would ordinarily assume to be made by a tornado
isn’t necessarily an indicator that a tornado was present,
 
like maybe just thinking about a tornado
sort of makes one happen,
the image precisely being unable to be seen with the eyes
the fact that makes it so destructive,
 
one event after the next,
like pages in a book that have yet to be turned
but still remain in that book,
or like memories that have yet to be retrieved
but which still remain in that head,
or perhaps like readers reading words on pages,
though the self spinning through those pages may have yet to be realized,

a perception I must have unknowingly realized as a child when,
after a tornado watch was given for our area,
and my father finished demanding the masking tape,
I raced my lanky rag doll of a body back to my toy box
to retrieve the Happy Meal boxes I’d saved
for moments such as these,
and rechecked the contents for the change of
underwear, coins, flashlight, string, fishing hook
I’d earlier dropped in there,
 
the bare essentials needed to pretend to survive in an apocalypse,
but which in all reality probably wouldn’t have mattered too much,
though I suppose it was important to feel like I had something.
 
Now, having graduated from The School for Apocalyptic Thinking
and enrolled in the New School for Self Reflective Feeling,
whenever I think of a tornado,
I can’t stop myself from spinning through the idea that,
as much as the tornado is a weather event,
it is also me as some torpid, almost godlike aspect within myself
secretly longing
to be understood as a bigger and more effectual version of
who I am,
someone who will leave irrefutable marks of change in his path,
not for some personal reason,
but for the simple fact that the world is a big thing
full of bigger things
secretly wishing it were even bigger,
 
and I would believe that,
I really would,
were it not for the fact that I’ve opened doors into my secrets
and found within them more secrets with more doors on them,
 
a realization that has taught me it’s important to practice
having less and being less than what I can be,
to wait around for everything to happen
and not do anything when it does,
just hanging out for a while, long enough for the walls to start
pulling away from the doors,
until there is no me
to be nailed together.