imperative

The rain arrived, though I wasn't there to witness it. The world mostly works this way, without consent or agreement. Things show up, things disappear. There is nothing to be done about it. I just sit and smoke, reading whatever I happen to be reading. The rain just falls and falls, a gentle sheen, a streaking of the view. I see whatever I happen to see.

Now it is coffee and laundry, scratched bifocals and the insistence of ash. The boredom one-eyed dog, and the hostility of the nervous cat. Music jangles in the background, machine noises and analogue hush. The human voice replicated again and again, our ghosts pressed deep into the skin and bone of our every artifice. Human feeling portrayed with a deft heart, human need manufactured into every commodity created. The shock is not in all the ways we become strangers to one another. We are so alike the shock is that we manage to not become the enemy of every other being we see.

It isn't so much all this want or all this need. It is the feeling of disarticulation that this dissonance between all these feelings and what the world allows that weighs. The freedom to demolish does not hold a corollary freedom to thrive. There are back roads and dead ends and lives without second acts native to every nation on earth. Time only runs downhill. You miss the rain when it begins, there is no going back. The heart flows in any direction it pleases, whatever the pain or weather. The rain will fall where it will.