lightning birdmad ionized and excitable bright lights and the cool breeze swirling in the thermals and standing the baby fine hairs on the back of your neck out of the grey clouds light the night like a flicker of day prayers for rain 020123 ... alice it was lightning out the day that everything suddenly made since... 020628 ... pilgrim A fine piece of SF written by Dean Koontz 020629 ... me a song title, from a band i know 020629 ... lulie took out my phone and modem for hours. 020629 ... Cicero momentarily the horizon is flouresent yellow electric memories flash in nights of passion I looked out a different window into the same sky and now I wonder about the fleeting qualities of the female mind 030219 ... belly fire fleeting?! 030220 ... blown cherry storm 030220 ... Riddle Me Not I can be quick, I can be deadly, yet many choose to simply adore me. I am the fascination of many minds-alike, yet each has their own, opinion of mine right. 031223 ... nom returns and cold rain a promise 040323 ... raze i saw the blue flash and almost thought i hallucinated it until the thunder came. it shut the power off. then it brought it back a second later. to intentionally misquote bob_dylan: ain't it just like a storm to play tricks when you're trying to be so quiet? 140706 ... kerry summer of 2020, first summer in philadelphia, steamy and sticky and smoky. evenings spent sitting on the front stoop drinking dogfishhead 60-minute ipa and smoking cigarettes. it’s easy to romanticize. in reality it was bleak at best, but we did have the backyard and nobody in point breeze has a backyard. long and narrow, overgrown with crabgrass, butting up to an abandoned building that faced point breeze ave. next to our yard was mary’s, with its garden statues and ancient stationary bike, and beside hers was jessie’s, with a treehouse and huge beds with lettuce and peppers and berries. being renters and without a mower or much inclination towards yard work, our plot stayed weedy and shady. but i liked it anyway because in the evening in summer it was full of lightning bugs. i hadn’t seen lightning bugs in who knows how many years. if we had them in corvallis i didn’t notice them, but it’s hard to imagine living seven years in a place and missing something like that. so when i saw them in philly i was dumbfounded, starstruck: there was magic there after all. they remind me of my childhood; school’s out, no shoes, no plans, dark blue woods, kudzu, cicadas and crickets. they remind me of the south, my romanticized sepia south. but they didn’t appear the next summer. this was disturbing to me. it reminded me of why i hate reading or watching any kind of news, because it’s always terrible and it always makes me feel helpless. i thought about doing some research online, was the lightning bug population dwindling as a result of climate change or something, but i couldn’t bring myself to do it. this is the third summer, i am in a neighborhood further south, and i don’t have a yard and this is fine. i can build my own jungle and walk to the park or the cemetery for some added greenery. tonight he said do you want to take a stroll? and i said of course. on wolf between 17th and 18th, there was a sinkhole the size of a car, cordoned off by caution tape. we stood beside it and gaped at the layers of pavement and concrete and at the darkness of the hole, and i joked that the one in front of our house, the one i’ve called the city about probably five times now, doesn’t look so bad anymore. we walked another block until we were by the lutheran church and the cemetery, and again we both stopped and our mouths hung open because between the headstones over the soft grass were countless lightning bugs. i wondered if i was imagining them, i’d never seen so many, but he saw them too. and above the cemetery and the houses and the steep roof of the church was the moon, pale orange and low, early. he suggested it was the moon that was doing it, that was bringing all the lightning bugs. He said it off-handedly. I asked him how, and he said he had no idea, but look, that moon and all these twinkling lights–both on one night? we took a few more steps and stopped again, transfixed. i noticed one crawling right under my nose along the wrought iron fence, so i cupped a hand around it, cradled it between my palms, and it lit up yellow like a lantern and flew dizzily away. it felt like such a gift to see them twinkling amongst the graves, and then it felt like a relief, to know that something magic still existed. now all we need are bats, i said. 220613 what's it to you? who go blather from