Tornado

I’ve been into this song for almost eight years, singing it at the KTV (by ear, of course, only) playing it while having a fag in the swirling leaves of autumn, knowing only that it meant that love was like a tornado. I never knew exactly what it was about until now.

Love is like a tornado? Life is like a tornado. Get sucked in the vortex that swallows you whole, ripped up and torn apart and swirling until you find youself in Oz for a few weeks’ vacation then spit back down into the high grass of Kansas only to find you’ve left a shiny red shoe behind somewhere and your dog’s writing you post cards from Acapulco.

Compartmental meltdown shifts into gear only to hear the drip of thirsty water on yards upon yards of thought-ends and thought-beginnings. Where you were brave before you now only hear a door swinging on its hinges as courage turns ’round and flips you the bird.

Haven’t you heard? These are the city limits in the heat of a broken sun. You can’t cross this line – you shelved your brain years ago, don’t you know? Where you feel lacking now is hacking away at the carefully constructed edifice of optimism that used to spire high in the sky, higher than the burning live wire sticking out of the noon-day sun. But what’s a few questions you feel you can’t answer? What does it matter when the burnt-up rubber of your screeching tires sits smoldering still under the ultraviolet rays, penetrating your days like prying fingers searching for the map of your heart. Where it is you really want to go, what it is you really want to do.

So you strap up the soul of your shoes and grab a stick to find your dog who has by now learned to speak Spanish with the margarita beauties in a far-off place. And in the gamut of emotions, or not, have you learned to pick up that pretty pen and again put words to paper. Trouble multiplied ten thousand times and sprinkled on the wind, so that even though there was enough of that in your storehouse, you decided to get more, and douse the fires that licked at the sides of the walls of your U-Haul.

And for what? Can you get past this strap, this last checkpoint? Won’t there be another one waiting in the hills, beyond the border, past the skies through which you’ll fly just to get a hint of which way you should be going? As you hang on a thread and sway, the clock – tick tock – keeps its time. The anger, the hurt and frustration… these are but words to be mentioned that pale against the brightness of the feelings themselves and intentions that shine so brightly when you hold them up to the sky but when you put them in your pocket, they die and the brilliant hues that revealed themselves before – they snap shut and stay mum, and they speak no more.

But in the long corridor that leads to the end of the hallway where we must make our turn, do you think that we can tear and burn all the chains that bind me to my leaden past? The ones that keep me a prisoner of myself and my defenses? Do you think if you take my hand and carry me past the door of brass, as I flounder here, heavy in heart – do you think you can carry me and drag me down that hall until we both fall exhausted… but free? If you extend your hand do you think you can command a life out of the ghost that is me? Tick tock – again that clock, and here we are huddled and muddled and wet and bedraggled, frayed ’round the edges, but…

Faith.

That gets us through this tornado.

Not knowing where to go or how to get there and whether you will get there alive.

Faith that keeps you riding that bloody skywave, no matter how high it goes and how giddy you get when you look down.