We are sitting with our heads against windows
rumbling in the storm letting the electricity
happen and happen
and the rain is slanting down like the laughter of gods
who have passed all 99 bottles of saltwater from the wall
around the room
and are drunk with static charges between their fingers
stretched as long and wavering and brilliant as auroras
which we turn our eyes upward to
stretching corneas to sky grasping
for reasons that blessings or miracles
could be so obvious.
Night, why don’t you ever sleep?
(Why are you so vain?)
Why don’t you shatter your million mirrors
and let Wordsworth and the other dead romantics
reflect upon you and not feel so lonely?
Romanticism—as you approach it like a busy street corner
is sterile and the window poets these days
get off on things like vacancies and slant rhyme
brewing their coffee weak and filling it with
hazelnut syrup
so it is less like they are drinking coffee
and more like they are waiting for the lightning to pass.
So today we are not poets
because there is still something romantic about rain
gray sky electric momentous light
and we still treasure the cadence and chaos of language
and we can put ourselves aside
to enjoy thunder while it stumbles
over our houses in its bleary ten AM drowse
clinging to the curtains of night until its head can stop
gyroscoping on our windowsills
like the hundreds of fruit flies
that have met the same fate.
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