Monday, August 07, 2006

Monsoon Memory

This is one of those days: reality is a blur and the portal to that magic rain life can briefly be traversed.

Everything is pregnant with moistness; swollen with rain.
Outside is a tropical rainforest.
Dripping. Oozing. Bursting.
Emerald sparkles on winter gray sky.
Inside is a papery forest hut, dry and cool and clean.
My feet in dry socks. But the wet is already in my bones.
Birds twittering and squawking and fluttering, and
the fat wet wind whistling past.
Snatches of songs I long forgot tuning in to my frequency on the moist crackling air.
Songs about perfect days and a distant past life I probably never lived. Or maybe I did.

Who knows the lives I've lived in that alternate universe of my monsoon memory.
Maybe, in another life, I was a leaf riding the swell of the Amazon.
Maybe I was a stone skipped on the surface of a pond in Kerela, or a paper boat rushing out of the Suez canal, eager to meet the sea.

They say the magnetism of the Moon makes people crazy, the way it pulls and pushes the tides and harnesses the ebb and flow of blood in the vein.
If you ask me, the Moon has nothing on the Rain.

Annihilate

My teeth hurt. My head is a vice. Every word I've ever choked down imploding me from inside. My arms hurt. My bones are diamond. ...