it’s raining outside,

(i think i love the rain)

but I’m sitting inside, safe, and I wonder,

my fellow poets, do you ever think about how

in a hundred years, a thousand, your writing will be incomprehensible, unreadable

it will have meaning known only to your rotting corpse in a form of language now obsolete and outdated

and, how, if you’re lucky,

(or not)

they’ll pin your words down with marker to whiteboard, chalk to blackboard, like a butterfly to cork

killing it with kindness, dissecting it with nothing but their eyes and knife-sharp minds

speculating endlessly on what you meant when you said you loved the rain

forgetting,

as scholars tend to do,

that you loved the rain for being rain and nothing more

you loved the rain for being rain and not for how it fell outside the windows a decade ago, a percussive accompaniment to the song you sang in choir when you were too young to know what it meant

(too young to know why it was cut from the show)

you loved the rain for being rain and not for how it used to turn into snow back when you took the cold for granted, back when you lived somewhere completely different, before you moved five hours away by plane

(before you moved five centuries away by mind)

you loved the rain for being rain and not for how the puddles on the ground mirrored your face back at you as you cried freshwater tears over the bloodied bathroom sink

(the bloodied bathroom sink that no one else noticed)

you loved the rain for being rain and not for how the sound of it on a tin roof could be mistaken for the bones of your grandmother rolling in their grave as you said you loved a girl instead of a boy

(you loved a girl but the girl didn’t love you back)

you loved the rain for being rain and nothing more

so, do you ever think about it?

(about how no one will know what you meant, when you said you loved the rain?)

my corpse rests under rain, now, unburied

unbreathing lungs drowning, clothes soaked through with bone-deep cold, no brain left to feel it

my organs spread out into words, words spreading into poetry, water drops splashing into blood and gore

I loved the rain

I loved the rain

(I loved the rain)

(pluviophile [n.]- a lover of rain)