In all her many years, the woman did not think she ever witnessed anything as ugly as rain. It wasn’t just the way it stuck to the ground, leaving muddy piles all over the city, littering the sidewalks with grime and built-up trash.

You waltz by
Zipping through my stratosphere
Leaving almost tangible trails
Streams of fog and particles of water
Falling slowly down to my earth
You come in and out of orbit
Following a reckless collision course
Sometimes I could reach out and touch you

and so the ideal takes form
shaped by what we think,
by the way we allow ourselves to think

come to you in
cyclical relapse
with each syllable
escaping

muzzling silence
be tempted to borrow
its imprisonment and speak in
dialogues conversed by

friction of skins.