slippery palms

sometimes your hands get so restless, it's impossible to hold them within the pages of a book. all the time i held respectable employment rainy days like this would make me think well-worn worker-ant thoughts. thoughts involving curling up and with a book and with the steaming coffee. it's sad how handy wistfulness has become. and how evocative its shorthand appears.

i long for things i don't recognise the comfort of. i don't curl up with a book, i prop it at up an unhealthy distance and often hold my feet splayed with concentration. i'm not a happy reader. i'm caffeine-intolerant and rainlight is lousy to read by. so what i really want to do on a rainy day is not to seep into some memorable storyboard, but to oversleep, meet a dear friend, get under bright lights, and play a board game. or watch tv or go to the movies. what i want to do is ignore the rain and have it surprise me everytime i step out.

the rains are a joyful people. if you need any proof of this watch how happily raindrops die on your windshield. they slap and sting and have teeth of silver. they wink at the sun, much to his embarassment, and when pierced by his gaze draw soppy multi-colored nothings on your eye. but colors run in water and that's why you sometimes see segments of rainbows lying misshapen on the road. the rains will destroy anything so long as they can get a poem out of it.

and these are the silver people we sing to. when they come we hold out our hands, necks, tongues. we delight in the slapslapslap while little saplings are flooded out of their homes and little worms coaxed out and trampled under. we're so intoxicated by their perfume, our senses go out of whack. receptors get soggy, mildewed. silverfish in our hair. shake em out and ask yourself this the next time you look out and see crystals suspended in the air, smashing on the street - how can anything so immortally eager to splinter and die hold on to something as finite as your heart.