quickly, quietly

The rain came
quickly, quietly, unexpected.
and I had misgivings,
but none so suspect
to think a sky I’d trusted
to be a prototype of blue
would suddenly darken, and break,
letting the world’s tears
out through cloud-sieves
that had hovered like hopeful harbingers
before they threw their harpoons—
those torrents of acid-rain-pain
back at me, like,
“We don’t want your sorrow—see what’s contained in us!”

So I hide
under man’s embarrassing attempts
to defy nature:
a stone awning
with carved portraits of importants
that will crumble
long before the rain
ever stops falling.

Staccato droplets
sprinkle the concrete,
and when I look
I see their flight, frenetic
like neurotransmitters
across the synaptic cleft of sky,
the cerebellum of heaven
halfway between
reflex and rationality.

These r’s are at odds
under the r-rain’s ticklish beating,
and so are rest and relaxation,
but no,
not remorse.

It colors my discourse,
my attempts to fire
across a different damning cleft,
between me / and everyone else
since the minute you left.

And I know I told you to;
I know I told me to…

But, like rain,
it can nurture or squander,
and this pain
forces me to ponder:
if it’s the right thing, why does it hurt?