The magical properties of rain

 There has been a lot of rain in my neck of the woods lately. Thunder, lightning, hail, impromptu rivers in the street-all of that, and it’s been awesome.

Seriously, rain is one of the best things about living on Earth and not on Mars. It takes you places.

 

A Trip Abroad

Today our tree-shaded sidewalks

borrowed some tricks

from their Italian forefathers,

transforming into rain-swept canals,

each following its own

separate current

to converge at a crossroads

in a gathering of tiny whirlpools.

 

A gondola might have come in handy.

Instead of heavy boots splashing,

groggy traffic interrupting,

we’d have all ridden to class in style,

patching our multicolored umbrellas together

to follow the rain’s path.

Eat my stardust

 To imagine is to prove the impossible.

 

Warp Drive

There are three lanes on this super-sonic highway

and the clouds are my mile markers.

 

Fellow travelers catch my stardust

as I blaze past,

a single frame branded into the retinas

of their windshields.

 

I chase myths and things improbable

in a light-fueled capsule that transcends space

and renders time obsolete,

like Phileas Fogg on a mission

to prove the world’s insanity.

Here's to moving on

 For the past nine months, I have occupied a basement room in a four-story residence hall on my college campus, and it’s been like living in a dank cave.

A dank cave whose walls soak in and regurgitate the smell of your neighbor’s spice-heavy vegan food.

I wish I could tell you that it’s been cave-like in a super mysterious and magical way. That I found a portal to Narnia by pressing a certain cinder block with two fingers of my left hand. That I’m actually a superhero with an underground lair.

I wish I could tell you that I got through this year without having to defend myself against the spawn of Shelob in the middle of the night (although, I suppose fighting demon spiders would count as “mysterious and magical”). But that dream was not to be.

When I wave this place goodbye tomorrow, I will have no regrets about wonders I’m leaving behind.

 

Cave-dweller

My cave has none of the usual charm.

Where gleaming stalactites might hang, ever reaching,

my cave boasts, instead, blinding fluorescent bulbs

that leave no corner unexplored.

No shred of battered sunlight struggles to meet my eye

through volcanic fissures ascending to unknown heights.

Rather, ergonomic strips of rotating plastic

are its filter.

My cave holds no grotto, no

untouched cavern with raw gemstones glittering,

no long-kept secrets of shadow and flame.

No dwarf worth his salt

would deign to glance twice at

my cave, with its lack of gold veins ready for piercing,

or columns of granite on which to carve

the grim, stony faces of his forefathers.

He would move on to distant lands,

where mountains’ steep cliffs rival skyscrapers-

palace walls for a subterranean king.

A poem

 Cold War

A tear is

a time bomb,

an acidic bubble of nitro-glycerin,

essence of everything incendiary,

set to self-destruct

until oxygen diffuses it.

That Green Feeling

 To me, it feels like there should be a super scientific way to predict which color people are  more likely to wear on which day, because some days, it’s uncanny.

Some days, you can go to five different classes and the supermarket and the mall and everyone around you seems to be wearing a green shirt, or a gray sweater, or the same very specific shade of turquoise (depending on the day).

Maybe it has to do with the cycles of the moon, or modern fashion.

Maybe it’s a top-secret government conspiracy (they’re either trying to identify conformists or weed out the color revolutionaries).

Either way, such a conundrum deserves a poem.

 

Green Day

Today is green.

Green for the fragrant spring air.

Green for the patch of grass

outside my window

and good news over the telephone.

Green for the efficient edge

of crisply folded paper.

Green,

like the soaring soundtrack

to shimmering cloud

whispering over and under,

cleaved by emerald-scaled wings.

Green like the lowest ring of sky

at sunset,

like diamond studs that drip

drip

drip

from a grandfather oak’s mossy beard

onto the revolving sphere

of my umbrella.