They call them dragons,
winds such as Rashabbar the black
who darkly binds the unwary, or dust spewing Calima,
she who herds madness from outside-inward.
Then there is Bayamo, the tree killer,
Tebbard the sultry doctor, a fever-wind
that dispenses fire and delusion.
Chinooks and Mistrals scour and skive.
The Haboob hunts where hunters hide.
Those named winds; gales that chisel faces,
as if they were cliffs.
Squamish, Elephanta, the Williwaw,
swirling thieves that steal babe,
crib, wimple and shawl.
I have traveled through some,
and avoided most.
When, in tornado season, I occasionally
roam from my Ohio home,
I think of those dragon-winds,
and scan the sky
for signs of a scaly whipping tail,
or talons clawing some fluffy clouds
before blowing a Dutch barn to bits.
With bravado, during a bayamo,
A bashful barbudo
with a propensity for dissentiousness
Flits bottomward, toward a sand encrusted crusado
A crusado, mayhap, wellaway once possessed by
A seafaring hildalgo skittering
Over cirulean crests
What wry musing must the esurient bashful
barbudo mull
While it wends it way to the wayworn crusado?
Once and now tantalized, the fearnought barbudo,
Now disappointed over a once thought commestible
Now ponders
An omen? An augur? A delitescent apocalypse--of doom, or
Delight?
Oh, bashful barbudo, unmew this encrusted crusado: expugate it!
Expurgate it form its extant niche
Release its' recondite spectres anon, without cunctation
What tales may it portend with a tactile congress?
Wend not to your shoals yet; shun the skates importuning
Now before a malevolent maelstrom wrests the soothsayer's crusado
Away
Vocabulary: barbudo-species polydactylus virginicus; crusado-Spanish coin;
esurient-hungry,greedy
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