BB Grey–musings

The head of the tornado is a wide, open mouth—
swallowing clouds, light, dust,
the stray wing of a passing bird.
Some things fall in gently;
others are ripped from their roots.
Where it touches down,
the finger of God stirs the world—
a chaos that is also a kind of order.

This house is taken, that one spared.
The path seems random,
unless you believe the wind and sky
listen to some hidden plea.
Maybe they do. Maybe they don’t.
But the spinning—
that’s the soul, I’m told,
though no one agrees what that means.
Maybe it’s just a yearning for home.
Or maybe it’s only spinning.

We take in what we can,
for a time that’s called ours
but is shared with strangers,
ghosts, other dust devils
spinning across empty plains
or city streets.
We bounce into one another,
leave marks.
But the beginning?
That wasn’t ours to choose.
We’re given the start,
and shoes, if we’re lucky.
They say where you end up
is your own doing—
but the walk from Timbuktu
is longer than from Vegas
when you’re chasing luck.

But I was speaking of tornadoes—
how everything enters the wide mouth above
and is refined below
into a single, pointed truth:
a life.
Your life.
The finger of God
touching down in a place
partly chance, partly birth,
always farther than it looks from where you began.

We do this to organize the chaos.
When life calls you out,
do you go all in
or fold like a plastic suit?
The house always wins.
Your cards are dealt face-up—
no mystery, only motion.
Even the card on your forehead
is just a feather turned the wrong way.
Silly, really.

And everyone looks like the cat
that ate the canary,
while poison swirls in the air,
and destruction touches
where it will—
filtered through 300-mile winds,
guided by all you’ve consumed,
all you’ve been.

Say you touch down here,
on sand and stone.
You call it home.
Then, as suddenly as it began,
it’s over.
Silence returns.
All that’s left is a cipher
written in memory.

The bird?
Only feathers remain.
The flying?
Gone.
Dirt to dirt,
wind to wind.