Burning Inside

My head is burning inside.

I sit still, listening to the silence, temples pulsing, thoughts racing. Outside, the future has arrived, today.

The homeless seek ephemeral refuge from the burn in temples of mammon. But soon they’ll struggle to find another way.

The children know, yet they shouldn’t have to know. Today’s hot but it won’t always be this way?

A city, in the south, hottest on earth. It’s fleeting, surely? Tomorrow, normality will creep and seep, erasing the memories. Good.

Hospital wards swelling with racing hearts and tightened chests, faces flushed, life teetering back and forth, here and gone. Today’s just a busy day.

Drops of moisture, gathered over weeks and months in pools and rivulets, singing in hope of growth and abundance, licked away in seconds by flames, raging with contempt for life, spurred on by the burring of rigs, the drilling of wells, the digging of bottomless pits to yield to a thirst that can never be quenched.

A family is packing up their life, a book, a photo, perhaps two – it’s all that’s left.

 Across the ocean, a father is thinking. His crops sinking, soil caught in a briny mess. 

To stay or to go…

In north America, it’s cold, so cold the snow won’t fall, the kind of cold that takes you far, far away from reality, sense and logic. 

The kind of cold that offers solace from the heat, an escape, a place to hide and pretend it’s all ok.

Tomorrow, an alarm will sound. She’ll go to work. He’ll go to school.  A billboard will be projected, in heads, a new headline etched. 

Phones will ring, inboxes will fill, plungers will drip, drip, drip. Sweat will bead upon preoccupied brows.

The tracks will shrink, the trains will run on time. The grid will heave a sigh of momentary relief. Rain will fall a little while. 
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And in the distance, there’s silence as a hole is drilled, a pit cut deep into a valley, a pipeline sunk hard into a forest. 

A tree falls, but does it? 
A mother cries, but does she? 
A farmer dies, but does he? 
The heat rises, but it’s all inside my head.