Apophenia in Wet November as We Search for Meaning

My friend tells me that he likes the rain & that it is falling proof that we are collectively alive—&
as we stew, fruit flies fed full on this Monday, it becomes the cold, decaying womb where we hide. What

does it mean, do you think, that water unravels into fog? When Achlys stumbles past above us, her
body a fleeing liminality, hit her & run. bite the bullet ‘till your teeth crack & grip the gun. But

I don’t even know if she intends for us to scrape out the light or become it. So I watch & do neither. The
once-warm concrete is a clamped mouth; the white stripes are wounds, before the blood work. Drowned,

the street tightens like leathery sinew stretched over the hips of a drum: the carcass of something. So,
I tell him that I disagree, think things through & of the umbrella forced open in my kitchen, its

iron ribs splayed like the legs of a neutered animal, drained clean of water & shaking. It
seems I think this is a story about loss & unhandled holes when really, it only just chronicles living. Well,

perhaps those two sunken tragedies are more difficult to divorce than I give them credit for. I
swallow them both to breathe, & to die, of course, I joke as we trudge around the corner. But

once New York is dry again, it will be the same maze as before the flood, so why not resent it then? This
bloated conversation is ironic & lame, & I want to know who made me a creature then left, bared

me down to a Metrocard, M Train, & a curse to live Plato’s allegory in a city with no opaque walls. I
am knees-deep in walnut shells of asinine glory, & the imposition that we are less flammable is small. I

mean, it has no bearing on the vicious taste of the honeysuckles we will dissect next season. So
in the meantime, find another wandering wild boar to sate & maybe throw a boat to herd me in, just

a little something to not fall through while I drink the rain which is really just the space between us, &
perhaps a wall ornament to boot, some sand-faced Medusa, to make me seem dangerous & less afraid