Storms

Cold winds gather
over spaces no one watches.
The room has no witnesses today,
no friends to mediate.

Just silence meeting silence
in privacy.

First words roll
across years of distance.
Each accusation builds,
follows routes written
in the marriage’s first quarrels.
Sharp truths write their brief script
on darkness.

No one reads these bright verbs,
these electric assertions.
The storm holds nothing back
not because someone might see,
but because storms arrive whole,
spend everything,
move on.

Anger falls in sheets,
in walls,
in architectures of grievance.
Each word finds its place
in geometries no one charts.

Voices build higher now,
white and formal
in their fury.

They crash on empty hearts
with the same violence
they’d bring to crowded rooms.

The storm’s mathematics
work out completely.
Pressure gradients,
emotional velocities,
electrical potential seeking ground.

At the storm’s center,
a column of stillness.
The eye that sees nothing,
needs no witness.

For hours the house endures
this private assault.
Pictures on distant walls
shake, fall, or hold.

No one keeps score.

After (and there is always after)
the silence remembers its level.
Words lessen by degrees.
What anger split,
exhaustion mends.

Morning will find objects
in new places,
patterns in dust no one will see
before the next day erases them.

But tonight,
in this unwitnessed hour,
the storm was complete.
Every grievance discharged,
every hurt at its full height,
every truth at its true volume.

Nothing held back for show,
nothing lessened by solitude.
Just the truth of what happens
when love turns to weather,
when hearts break in empty rooms
as completely as anywhere.