the Rain King

 The sun here is not a star. 

It is an instrument. 

A blade. 

A furnace door left open

above the Chihuahuan Desert. 

By noon 

it has burned through every excuse.

Every costume. 

Every carefully rehearsed lie. 

The heat strips this world to its skeleton. 

It sterilizes.

Purifies. 

Reduces. 

Until everything stands exposed

in the harsh honesty of pure light. 

The mesquite. 

The mountains. 

The man. 

Nothing escapes. 

The sun demands the truth.

And it is patient. 

Year after year

it bleaches bone white. 

Turns wood into driftwood. 

Memory to dust. 

Leaves skulls gleaming among the landscape .

Like relics from an extinct religion. 

Hollow. 

White.

Sacred. 

As if holiness were simply 

what remains 

after false has burned past marrow. 

Above me, 

the sky is oceanic. 

Impossibly blue. 

So deep it feels swimmable. 

As if I could dive upward 

and disappear into its endless depths. 

Yet I stand here parched. 

Tongue thick with dust. 

Skin thirsty for mercy. 

Looking into an ocean 

that offers no drink. 

Praying for rain. 

Just one dark cloud. 

One crack of thunder. 

One drop striking my shoulder 

like a blessing. 

One drop sinking into desert sand. 

Another. 

Another. 

The earth opening its hands 

to receive them. 

The creosote breathing again. 

The dust settling. 

The ache easing. 

The old ghosts washing downstream.

I wait. 

I pray. 

I listen. 

The wind moves through the basin 

with the sounds of haunted voices. 

Cotton candy clouds drift overhead, 

Soft and white and temporary. 

The desert breeze carries them Westward. 

I watch them fade. 

Watch them unravel. 

Watch them become nothing. 

And with them 

goes another life. 

A life built around injury. 

On confusion. 

On the casual wreckage 

we leave inside one another. 

A life that caused mostly hurt. 

A life i no longer wish to carry. 

The sun takes it. 

The wind scatters it. 

The horizon feasts upon its remnants. 

Picking its teeth. 

Suddenly I am standing 

on the east side of sorrow. 

The place where mourning ends

and unnamed things begin. 

The place where grief becomes distance. 

Where distance instills silence. 

Where silence grows into peace. 

I crown myself the Rain King. 

Not because I command the clouds. 

Not because I possess any power. 

But because I have learned 

to thirst. 

To wait. 

To believe in water 

while suffocating in drought. 

To trust what has not yet arrived. 

The sun continues its work. 

The old life fades. 

The clouds dissolve. 

The bones glow brighter. 

And beneath the vast blue ocean of sky, 

with the desert burning clean around me, 

I remain-

stripped to the core, 

hollow as ash, 

white as bone, 

ready at last

For whatever rain comes next. 


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