1

Rain is made up of all the known people, it slightly gets them together, it hastily spruces them up. Its patters turn foundations into hooks. I am never clear-headed.

I move the geraniums to a more sheltered place. In all apartments, old age is at a rolling boil. The staircase is dreadfully empty. If a body moves on the landing, it pulls its shadow off the walls.

People do not greet one another here. The young are bellows stuffed with chores, and teenagers walk by as if dying of thirst. Somewhere in the basement, amnesiac rivers are flowing...
The water you grow up on is paint and danger: I boil it, I filter it, I derust it of limestone and lead.

And I am so nice. Loneliness is when I cannot hear myself, when I cannot hear you. We live in a half-erased stick figure. Waiting.

I am looking for my self; it is inside drawers, charts, doctors; I am passing a field of residues; I put gauze faces all around me; it is the worst when you don’t even have a name.

2

When illness comes, people turn around like wind-up toys. Clinics start moving steered both ways. Roads turn yellow and acetone leaks from foundations. Life is simple, greased as an engine. It lacks a helicopter flying it to a large city. People are made of wire strands scattered in the rain. They melt away here and there, some of them so close to others.