when it rains these days

around this time of the year, when it rains, it brings with it the intensity of all the pain preserved in forgetting memories or at least in attempting to forget, and the wetness of the rain is matched by the remorselessness with which it falls. one thinks of times past, and one wishes that the past could return only if it gives us the whiff of those hours that then were seemingly as uncultured as times present. one no longer thinks of this falling rain with compassion or attaches to present hours any redeeming myth for that is the right of all previous nights. i think of poetry now only as a kind of nostalgia. poetry is only nostalgia, a remembrance. without memory there is no poetry and without poetry memory is as remorseless as this falling rain.

in other hours at other places on other nights, in summer outside cafe's along seafronts in cheap coastal towns, at dawn but usually at dusk, when it rains and it rains a soft mellifluous rain, a melancholic rain, a soft rain, a rain of memories, a dark dismal rain, unrepentant rain, that too is cause for poetry, it is of poetry, it causes poetry, in the glow of certain lamps, in the trailing light of certain footsteps, after the echoing fall of certain footsteps, in the gap between the echo and the step is also poetry, a heart rending abysmal poem.

our sorrows are no longer those that bring with them lasting memory of lasting aches but are born out of the cinder of instinctual pain, ready to delight the nostalgic taste of fabricated lovers. one thinks of a growing pressure in a beating heart, this rain that falls, that face that stood outside the bright arc of those lonely lights, the shimmering haze of blowing shadows, that plea for understanding, the immense speed of passing time, the known hollowness of tender emotions. and the rain that keeps falling, the rain that brings poetry.