The Rain Beneath Your Skin

And what is there really but fear and little breaks in the fear now and again.

In your mouth, the cold wet suburban streets calling for no one.

You trace the quiet desperation that rings itself around your week-old coffee mug and cherish the meek sadness of the rain which has gone on for decades underneath your skin.

You try to write but all the photographs are full of messages you cannot keep from weighing down your mind.

Time is always someone else’s.

Every person has a camera and each image is a waste because they are the same and never stop. The people, their hurt-filled eyes, the ignorance of their blackened words in constant.

A soft being dressed in white dances before the sun, they are setting into the sickness of green seaside.

I suppose I am afraid for all the reasons anyone would be afraid.

The deafness of silence and the way a scream fills the bathwater.

The fear which both bridges and divides one moment and the next as the evening comes but not carefully enough.

There is a moment I can feel in my chest like a song you wrote but not for me, an empty beach in December which drifts in the marrow of my bones.

You do not meet me and you are everywhere.

You are faceless without body or tongue, though all I do in these dead hours of sliding panic is imagine you exist.

A place I can lay down inside forever.

An opening in the blue.

We no longer seek for breaks of light.

We no longer hear the ticking of the clock.

The photographs and the people they capture,

continue falling like rain for ages.

.

Photo by Christopher Ott