Noise

Rattle my head with hard explanations,
contradictory dickishness,
absurd recitations; listen to the language
of the storm.  Warm rain
drains the clouds, now.  Outside, inside.
Loud with their lightheadedness, they are
like the drunk at the end of the bar.  Hard
ass on wooden stool, dissatisfactions described
and the distracted bartender.  How he
protects himself, cool indifference.
Just another customer sick
with the trick of their alcoholic fantasies.
Their "undying love" is a kind of hangover
but the happy-go-drunkly regular
cannot help herself.  She is only
one vodka seven away
from going into the ladies room
to remove  her panties.

The smoke is gone, but the bars are still filled with the crescendoing voices, the scowls and grimaces, the unhealthy choices.  Make the rain end, bend the sky down to the horizon and climb into the night with its expectations.  The streets are laquered with neon and rain, engines and horns and pain.  You are going home.

A Rainy Day in the Mountains

The water on the window, on the leaves, the water working through the blue granite bed.......

it is overgrown with fur and fern, overgrown.  It is overgrown.  It is following some impulse, 

some quixotic wish...        

The water running on the bloody red clay, or rushing under bridges into viaducts that sink into the earth like a vampire's teeth are lubricated 

by his desire...  

water, unquenchable, water, thirst that bursts like dams, the water wasting the land, the land wasting the water...  

This man is waist-deep in his faith, and he assures the surface mirror that there are fish there,

below.

The sweat that wets his forehead, the rain that finds his palm...the drops are but a beggar's alms, the coins flashing, dropping, clattering, scattering in the cupped hands...brand new coins...bright metal...gold, silver, bronze...

in the fountain, the copper is butter and honey, mixing with the sunlight that dives in to convalesce deep in the pool...  The water talks, tongues running over and under, that adolescent hunger to be known, and the hum of its falling waters wants to talk to us, tell us a story, stencil ringing the bathtub with all your neurotic projections...  

remember....the water always distorts everything, your fingers below the surface, the sunken boat in the cove, the pennies, heads reclining in pillows of moss and superstition.

Water, ice in my drink, my glass of water, the shower I squander, the toilet I flush... water streaming, stretching out on waterfalls, reconciling with mortality in rising vapor...  a congregation, the tears of angels, knit together like pearls...

clouds

rain

the tin roof rhythmically pebbled throughout the afternoon, the evening...until, lying in your bed, the water--on the roof, on the window, in the creek outside the cabin, the ocean in the shell--will tell you anything...

you want to hear.