May 3, 1999... the day I lost something I never thought I'd care about losing. My high school.

In the wake of the awful Oklahoma tornados, the scenes of destruction broadcast nationwide... I was lucky. 1/2 a mile away from death, I lost no loved ones, no material possessions. But I still felt a loss.

It was the beginning of the last 3 weeks of school, I was looking forward to it. I'm a senior! Yeah! I was going to take my camera and get pictures of everyone, everything, that I'd come to love so much in a year. I used to despise Westmoore, but as this year went on, I loved it to pieces. I found my niche. Finally!

When I found out a tornado hit my school (about an hour afterwards - some people were up there for an awards show, and couldn't drive their wrecked cars back home, so they began walking and happened to pass by our house), it was like a joke. You know, you always say "Oh darn, why couldn't it have hit the school?" ....This wasn't a joke. I didn't know the extent of the damage, but the auditorim was ripped up pretty bad. There was no more roof. And dead horses from the fields next to the school lay among the debris.

Next to the auditorium is the art room. I'm an art III student. My class was getting ready to have an exhibit at the local library to showcase all our works, everything we'd done this past year that we were especially proud of and wanted others to look at in awe, or buy even. All our best works were collected the week before, and sat in the storage room between our class and the 3D art class. And they were all in the building, next to that auditorium, when the tornado hit.

Years of love, hard work, tears that were put into my drawings. And for all I know, now they're gone. Everything I stood for and had the patience and ability to accomplish is most likely ruined. How do you cope with that? What do I put in the frames that stand empty, up alongside the wall, waiting for something to return? ... How can I stand here and be powerless?

My senior year is ruined. My hard work was taken from me. My life is a void. That's what this poem is about.

I wanted the poem itself to be read before the rant for two reasons... One, because it can be interpreted very differently until you hit the last line. I didn't realise it when I wrote it, but it also reflects another loss I had in my life around the same time, addressed in some other poetry. I loved the parallel, and wanted it to remain hidden on at least the first read. Two, I had lots of subtle hidden references I tied in, and I wanted those to stay kinda mystical. And if you know what the poem is about, they're kinda obvious - I didn't want blalancy (is that a word?) out of this one.

The title, "Storm", refers to the big tornadic storm we had that destroyed my school. The tornado went on for over 60 miles, and my part of town was the hardest hit. It began as an F4, but turned into an F5 as it ran over SW OKC and Moore, and then regressed back into F4 before it finally died. (And on a tornadic scale, F0 is the weakest, F6 is the strongest.)

I don't know why I wrote this in the format I did. It's more of a descriptive essay, the same as My Lost Childhood was. Funny how my calm reflections on things I've lost turn out this way. I guess I think rhymes don't do them justice... They're more emotion than words. If that makes sense. Fuzzy logic there, huh?

Of course, the "crumbling away" refers to the damage done to the school itself. All the talk of the rubble, the damage, the ripping apart was literal. The "twists of fate" line was a slight ref to the tornado, since the slang term used for them is "twisters". My "reality" being nothing I'd truly known was in reference to the fact that I still hadn't seen the damage with my own eyes - just rumours and reports.

The "pool of thoughts", as I realised later, could be thought of as something about the pipes busting in the auditorium - it flooded. I didn't mean it to be that way... of course, I meant none of the references til I looked at them and realised them... but that one's stretching it, even for me. Same with the "moments becoming more cloudy", as it could refer to the aftermath where the sky remained cloudy days later. Again... long shot!

The surrealist painting line is interesting. It goes back to the fact that my place in the school was in the art department (whether anyone agrees with me or not;), and the loss of my stuff was *real*.

For the most part, the rest of the poem is self-explanatory based on the fact that it was about a building rather than a person. The only other line I could even shed a hidden ref on is the "end of the hall" line. The art room was located at the very, very front of the building... not the entrance, but the front, facing the main road. It was almost a place all its own, it hardly felt like a part of the school sometimes. You had to turn a few twisty corners to get to this hall, a narrow and dark hall, with only one door almost hidden from view. It had an eerie alleyway feeling to it, like you were sectioned off from the rest of the world, and it might be a problem if you're claustrophobic or scared of being raped. Anyway, I wrote that line with the hall to the art room in mind... Cos when you first go down there, it's so dark and small that you don't know where you're going. You need the guidance.

It's a sad way to leave your high school... memories of a destroyed building, and precious talent (the only thing that makes me feel worthy) gone.