Asia’s Rain

Surprised the night
Didn’t last very long
And her song
Kept playing in my dreams
I awoke before she did
Got ready for my day
Smiled
Then returned to bed
And woke my lover
Like a cleansing rain

Cannons of clouds fire rain straight down
from their boiling black muzzles
each day in December
from exactly 3:30 to 4:30 p.m.
to explode the cheap tin roofs
in the townships, detached from the cities
and the servant’s shacks, detached from the white houses,
but there is no apartheid of heat and noise.
It’s like a bomb blast that lasts
for the long summer hour,
contained by flimsy construction,
absorbed by the oil-dark bodies
sitting and waiting within.
When the noise stops, the people emerge
into the breathable air
and feel the cool, moist earth
beneath bare feet.

Love and lies are all your life contains.
This wind-blown dust that heaps upon the sill
will wash away like tears and rain.

You fill your days with words you know are vain;
you fill your night with lonely cries until
love and lies are all your life contains.

With forehead pressed against a cracking pane,
the trickling blood which slowly starts to spill
will wash away like tears and rain.

And in this mood of contemplative pain
through blood-smeared windows visions mock, but still
the love, the lies are all your life contains.

Strength!  Work to do! Bills to pay! Love to feign.
And everything your emptiness can fill
will wash away like tears and rain.

Don’t cry, my child, you’ll only go insane.
That life which can create can also kill.
The love and lies which all our lives contain
will slowly wash away like tears and rain.

Blue rain on Monday
freezes before evening
and you slide through
the rest of the week.

Friday night finds you
under a blue neon sign
melting ice-cubes in scotch
in a downtown bar
where the whores
never leave you alone.

One slides your scotch-chilled hand
along her wet thigh
The weather, she sighs
Take me tonight.
I hate being alone
in the rain.