I CLOSE MY EYES WHEN IT RAINS 27feb09 I close my eyes, and I am in a glass cube, and all around me it is raining. No. I am in a high rise for the poor, in a crappy one room flat, with peeling walls and irreversibly dirty floors. I must be close to the top, because I hear the rain above me. In repose, tranquil upon this floor, dirt means nothing. Below me a static murmur, radio intonation, the sounds of a distant TV set. Outside my walls someone shouts. I smile. There is a ballet teacher down the hall. She is foreign, she shouts at her secretly favourite student. They must be working overtime. Only a few studios away from me, dancing for life. Harsh shouts out of love, out of desperation, out of dedication to art and beauty! How the student continues to persevere, whirling around inside the belief and trust and passion! This continues. Nothing held back by mere vocal chords. There will be violins and dance electric and applause and tears and a bond to which words hold no rival. There will be a show, with everyone’s passion isolated, like an impossible theory of perpetual motion, like a conservation of energy, the highest degree, the dancers in their relative places, each moving alone and together, warping time and space. That is what comes of today’s rain. That is what comes.