Walking around, faces like watercolors; everyone beautiful and out of focus in the world.
Luck is blind, or being blind. Whenever you want in the rain, you can remove your glasses. You walk around in the dark, everyone a friendly face. Homeless men offering to buy flowers for your girl.
Rain doesn’t find you, unless you’re lost in the district. Like two children in between numbered streets; like numbness and stumbling. Rain never found me until I made it home. Rain doesn’t quicken the pace. It slows your breathing and the reaction of your skin to danger; so that even when grasping for the solidness within the fire’s heart, like touching clavicle and shoulder. There’s no sense of harm. Rain doesn’t quicken our breathing, but makes it one.
Rain does not wash away regret, it barely covers up your steps, footfalls on the ruddy pavement. Rain does not lead me to forget. Cold won't know when I’ve had enough, it hardly eases when I’m spent, tucked beneath a pile of sheets. Cold won't slow the thought process, or reaching out in front of me next to passengers headed for God knows where, unable to see that there are tiny fingers enlaced in my own, and the sweetness of you in my hair upon my retreat.
Tiny hands don’t grip softly, but suffocate. Like Strangler Figs in the jungle, making homes out of wood and bone. Killing what it wants so badly, keeping the memory alive, within. Tiny wrists cannot wrap safety within, when the leaves have lived so long in the sun.
Rain doesn’t make you shiver like memory; Images in your head safe from droplets and memory, bathed in the red glow of the darkroom where they continue to process like color film, impossibly slow, like memory, like zero speed. Rain doesn’t wake you with undeveloped photos. Like memory.
Rain doesn’t cloud your vision; Wandering through lobbies in a dream without your glasses. A night full of faces beyond arm’s reach, unclear like watercolors. Everyone is beautiful when you’re blind. You have to listen carefully, and listen to touch until your fingertips become voices, even when those voices tell you that rain doesn’t cloud your judgment.
Waves on warm beaches won’t wash away your will. It will set out to sea each night with the moon only to return when you feel safe and miserable. Stopping waves is easier done tearing down the moon. It sets out against you, lending raindrops to the sky, falling as a reminder that your will is set to return. Warm salt waves won’t wash out those kinds of wounds.
Alms won’t save you a place in line. Alms won’t buy your seat in heaven.
Writing this won’t take your mind off things.
Raindrops are not the currency of atonement. Rain won’t buy your ribbons at the Eastern Market.
Rain doesn’t fill in the blanks. I can look to the skies to set my daily agenda, picking places to visit with a friend by picking cards. Watching couples walk by. Look at that one. He’s holding off as long as he can. It might be days and days before he gives in. Rain won’t provide the easy way out.
But demons don’t do well in domesticity.
Rain is not heavy enough to wash away memory.
The hints between two people who have known each other all their lives but only just recently met seem obvious to only them. No one else can really know this. No one speaks that language they share.
I’m always on a flight, more departures than arrivals. My baggage policy the same as the airline, only what can fit in my overhead compartment.
Rain is not heavy enough to wash away memory. Not washed away, but distorted and drawn. So that your thoughts streak like mascara. Rain is not heavy enough to wash away all sense.
Today was a little different. It’s raining upon my arrival. Today it’s snow.