Reading the book RAIN again

there isn’t enough rain in it

outside the blue flowers

whose names I don’t know

shine in a strange wet light

I remember when M.

was so sad I was jogging

through the rain around the park

it was just barely spring

the woods were lovely

dark and deep

and in a little cluster

were those blue flowers

they seemed among the trees

to be our friendship or something strangely 

out of place on Earth

Sleep is particularly important

for me and so I sink into

the couch. You put a dog

on it. A watchdog

barks in the night

and it’s horrific! I

know I will get in shape

for your wedding day

by eating only rain.

Passion, fools, walking

hand in hand through

an unnamed forest

we turn to face

the season

a breath of cool

rain on these streets

Teaching a little boy

blacksmithing

to make a sword

if there are zombies.

A woodpecker 

is the heart of the forest.

The weather 

is locusts in the distance.

The clang of the poem

on the anvil

beneath the trees.

Teaching the butterflies

to fly in a spiral

overhead. With short strokes.

A temporary distraction

from the sadness

of bureaucrats.

The deliberate removal of stimuli from your senses could, potentially, be interrupted by the ostensibly unignorable stimuli associated with drowning, which they say feels like burning. They also say when you drown, you’ll still try to scream, which consumes more of the oxygen you’re losing as you drown, quickening the hypoxiation of your cerebral self. The throat spasms, attempting to occlude the tunnel to the lungs. But people still do it, try to scream. Drowning, however, is a quiet event. Drowning occurs more frequently in daughters and the young. Drowning occurs more frequently in losers and quitters. Drowning occurs more frequently in the newly poor, the newly paralyzed. You can’t get bedsores when you’re drowning. That’s one good point.

There’s a couple upstairs, they’re mostly quiet except when they shout. You wouldn’t think it but they were born in the belly of the very same star. The man is from Latvia and the woman is from Liberia and when they shout, they shout in English. Any day you make me disturb, Fatuma! says the man. I feel myself disbelieving in you. Why you can’t say me how you feel in the heart? Why I have to play the funny guy always with the games you make on me? 

Fatuma says nothing. She picks up her mobile and pretends to send an SMS. 

I could eat, she thinks.

We walked on the path through the woods

far enough that our teeth evolved pairs of legs

and bought upscale mansions with the furniture

already in place. They left the price tags on everything.

The whippoorwills hid where the river was

and all they could do when we found it was sing

and that was alright, mostly. The ducks

were decoy ducks and the grass

was decoy grass,

but the water was just water.

The only solution for what we had

was a map unfurled and pinned in place

like a rare insect. At least,

this is what the dentists would like us to think.

Things erupt from nowhere. 

They are limited to two of something

spaced out by three of nothing,

but even this a rare triumph of mineral

over flesh. Call it reintegration.

Call it wandering. Call it home.

We went too deep into the river

and were sucked into the gum of the earth

like an ant into amber. We were highways

stretching over a floodplain, we were random structures

that could only stay with us or leave.

We were things the earth gave back to us.

Nothing is where it used to be.

I picked through the cardigans of a ghost

and found the moth-holes all rearranged.

They said that the farther you traveled,

the closer you came, but that was pure hackwork,

a campaign against the elderly.

I was out for a stroll when the sun

put a banana to my throat

and demanded my wallet.

This must be how the empire was taken,

I thought.

A poem about teeth knocked on my door,

dressed up as a salesman.

The price tags were still on his suit,

but you could tell he was an imposter.

I forgot about everything but the whiteness

of his face. Whiteness within whiteness like

a blank page or a watch face with no arms.

It felt right to feel like a starless night,

at least for now.

I put yellow sticky notes on everything

and they looked like flashlights

moving through a forest, 

though I didn’t know

what they were looking for.

Maybe they didn’t either.

A man told me aluminum never leaves the brain

and I pictured it like this, a swarm of flashlights

flickering through the darkness.