Bangkok Rain

Flash floods enter our lives on the evening news, spilling over the sidewalks and makeshift bridges and land-masss asphalt with which we connect the places we go, to and fro, the places we go without actually goinjg anywhere in between. The shades of patchwork are strong if only the sun were bright enough during the rain; it is just as well that it is not, for a rainbow would serve only as a welcome distraction.
Rain is compliments we wish to bestow, but are afraid of the cost; it is the small child's cry, the myriad of stories pressing in upon us, stories oozing through the pores and running from the eyes of the saccharine faces we encounter, the unshaven faces, and the faces dyed the color of blood. Rain is lovely things,rain is terrible things, rain is things that we think about, but cannot calculate into our flesh's compass; it is the single use of a word that means so much more, though its gravity is lost upon the black-hole sidewalk, it is the missed connections of every day, the day you walk past your future best-friend-to-be or the willing bride-to-be, the unwashed stone on the riverbed, the current forcing weeds and brown water and swimmer's feet, ignorant of treasure.

As such, life is a game of checkers which will never be won, with your red pieces, crying for air as they sit cringing on the border between the bright and dark squares, the evil and the good.
Life is the questions that will never be answered, the ever-fading inquiries that bounce off the canyon wall after dark, as you stand, your neck bruised from stranger's grip, teetering among the shale and loose stones, screaming for a voice that will not come.
If this is life, and life is rain, give me a tattered umbrella and moth-eaten rain boots.