Torment

A wind blasted tree, not lightning struck, but raped by a heartless wind. Just the one tree on a bare-assed hill, It stands pallid and naked, its bark striped away by raging teeth. I pick up a stick from the ground, it’s a severed branch as stiff as an artificial limb, tap the storm-shorn trunk, note that the tree is not hollow yet. If lightning had split it, it would have echoed a deeper, deadlier silence. Within the wood is a narrowly constricted throat, it is still able to speak through that elongated windpipe. What did I hear? I heard a caged wind being strangled to death, and death, it had a ghost-white face, that’s what I heard, that's what I thought I saw through wide, and astonished eyes.