Cafe Writing January Project is very interesting. This is my first time trying this after discovering the site through a fellow blogger Why Paisley. I chose to write about a picture I love, this is not really fiction but more of a scene, a reflection of one of my role models Nikola Tesla. This picture has inspired me over the years and has showed me that anything is possible. A short poem I also wrote following the piece.

Tesla’s Chair of Electricity
Current through the air, oh those dreams you dared. The first time I saw you in the photo above, almost a hundred years after the negative dried, I couldn’t believe my eyes. Who would stand so close to danger? Who wouldn’t fear the electrical current that surrounds them? The answer is the man who discovered the impossible. The man out of time, the ‘Lord of the Lightning’. Looking at you, writing away, discovering something new, I let my mind slip into the past and travel to your time. It was 1899 in Colorado Springs that you constructed a tower of metal to send electricity through the air all the way to New York. To this day a task that has never been completed, a task that no one is crazy enough to try.

I’ve fallen in love with the meaning of this picture, the achievements of your mind. The truth that once you put your mind towards something don’t let anything stop you. However even the smartest of men fail, even the most brilliant fall. You lived your life, stubborn but true to science. A life about current and the radio wave and today you are the image of the mad scientist as the man you once mocked is seen as the icon of a genius. What I see most out of this picture is fearless and dedication, an old world that will never come back again since those discoveries have brought us our modern necessities, your imagination empowers our modern economy.

What would it be like to be in that chair, to surround one self with thousands of volts of current? The never stopping snaps and crackles that puncture the inner ear, or feel the burning sensation as a stream of white light comes near. What would it feel to have the current flow through the body the way you demonstrated to so many, would is tickle or sting? You do not care for these silly questions. No. You do not care at all. These are below you as you write our future technology.

As I stare into the past, the picture tells me more, it talks to me and teases me and makes me come up with wild dreams. If a man can accomplish so much, pour thousands of volts of electricity through there body, change the world with a switch and yet a hundred years later be a ghost to the modern world then our actions no matter how grand they become in the end only belong to the person who performed them. I want to be in Tesla’s chair of electricity and be so calm and focused while the rest of the world shoots off its chaotic lightning storm.

His Name Blew A Fuse
The birthplace for our obsession
of the great radio waves,
the man who perfected the art.
He proves this point calmly
sitting in an uncommon spot.
Whether a genius or a mad man,
it is easy to note his radiance.
As thunder strikes around him,
the lighting sparks within.
Thank you Nikola Tesla,
for all the cell phones and data,
transmitted through the air.
Without the ‘man out of time’,
electricity would only be direct.
Though his name blew a fuse
many remember his alternate current.