2007: Written as a service-learning participant on the International Partnership for Service Learning (IPSL) semester in Guayaquil, Ecuador, as a junior at Cornell University.

 

It feels like rain

When you don’t feel the heat

Until you know the cold has a cause

That kept you warm for so long

 

It feels like rain

When you don’t see what you lost

Until the void becomes what you gained

 

You tried, you did

Intentions plastered on the resume of your leap

You ripped to get out

Clasping the weapon of change

but the shape you designed is discarded and the

absence

is the change that changed everything

until more truth is held in the hollow of that hole

than what you ever intended to do or

ever thought you would see or know.

 

You still are so apart

Not even close

To being out or raining like

Them

 

They? Me?

 

But inside the view

you stand speechless

Splattered and drenched by

Shadows of the figures

Falling around you

Cascading and slipping down the sides

of that bubble encasing you-

terrified by the power and weight of nothingness

Raining down on top of you.

 

they were always there

and in

awareness

the invisible simultaneously collide

too fast for faces to form

morphing your dark womb masked

in transparency into a web

of only frantic fingers grabbing each another

 

And it feels like rain

All these images pouring inside of you

All you can see are hands

 

Scratching out scars,

over, out, under, through lives

Emaciated rusted fingers

twisted lines and blisters

Foraging for familiar or kind faces

snaking for something

To latch onto as sweaty child palms

Tear through your hair and

They smile

Thinking its gentle while

Mimicking the mannerisms of anybody

Who has ever touched them

Pushing hitting fighting

All in play

When circumstance has never let them play at all.

 

It comes down in currents

So rough and so unforgiving

breaking through the tarp

built before you were born

piercing your royal white peel

 

you can hear the rain coming down now

foreign babble dripping down the side in

tears of misunderstanding

and injustice

while brown ash of multitudes silenced

becomes thick sludge as it

settles into pools on the pavement

collecting at your ankles

burying your body

too fast for you to plan any action at all but

covering you in a color that will come off

in just one hot shower.

It feels like rain

even when you reach your

own hand

out from under your shelter

extend your

own face up to catch the world as it

comes falling down and open your

own mouth

to try and swallow just one or two

everything still keeps falling around you

 

slipping between closed fingers and

seeping into the depths of clenched thighs

a suffocating necklace pinching its noose of watery beads

as small petals are stones with the weight of many

 

it feels like rain

helplessly plummeting onto eyelids so much

it stings

in so many different stories

too many different drops

that become daggers

even when you try

to look up or open or see

sight squints

 

its all too much to control so

you fall victim

to the mind of a child 

gaping at a world

wondering

can it really be

true?

Why did nobody ever say?

And most of all

who or how

did anybody ever let it get to be this way?

 

so meaning just keeps

falling

people keep

crawling

and you stay standing

 

feeling the rain