DUSTSTORMS AIN'T THAT BAD

 April 11 2025

6:00 PM – Dusk
Today, the sky decided to go mad—and I joined it.

While everyone ran indoors, their scarves and coats flapping like frantic wings,
I walked the other way.
Dust clouded the city until it became an old, half-erased painting.
The buildings lost their shape.
The streets disappeared into a blur of ochre and gold, a smoggy watercolor of panic.
The wind howled like it was laughing at everyone’s attempts to stay clean, to stay safe.
But I didn’t want to feel safe today.
I found the old swing in the yard, creaking in protest, like it too remembered something it hadn’t felt in a long time.
Maybe it missed me. I sat and pushed off with my feet.
The sky thundered above me in a forked crack of light—
beautiful and terrifying, like truth whispered too loudly.
The city flashed white, then darkness again. Then white again.
The rain hadn't started yet, but I could feel it—
marching, determined, pulling everything in its path toward the inevitable.
I realized, mid-swing, that I was standing in the middle of my life
like someone too close to a painting to know what it's about.
I’d been watching sunsets, chasing golden hours, thinking that was the story.
But the storm had been behind me all along.
The pressure building, the tapestry forming—loud, black, complicated.
It wasn’t until now, suspended in mid air between earth and sky, that I saw the pattern.
Each lightning strike lit up the storm’s story.
The story was me— growing too fast and too quietly.
The storm was the truth I’d been avoiding. It was wild.
Unapologetic. Frightening but not evil And somehow… freeing.
The trees around me rustled like they were whispering secrets,
and when the first drop of rain kissed my face, I laughed. Really laughed.
Like I used to when I was small and didn’t care who was watching.
The storm sang yes to everything I thought I’d lost.
I’m still swinging now. The wind is my accomplice.
My singing And freedom—well, maybe she never really left.
Maybe she just lives in moments like this, when everyone else runs inside, and I decide to stay.


“Say Yes to Heaven”
Dust writes poems across my skin— Old lullabies I once lived in.
I swing where silence dares not stay, In the heart of dusk, I lose my way.
Wind sings chaos through the trees, As raindrops fall like whispered keys.
City shrinks in a yellow blur, A ghost of things I thought I were.
Storm is not the end I feared— But every truth I’ve finally heard.

C.P.