night rain

when in the tub, door shut, candles lit, outside the rain sloshing into the cement buckets the city made, water from side to side under the growls of tires, you sweat.

you might then reach your wrinkly feet or hands for the green blue tile that crawls up the wall like ivy, and feel the cold of its back, the hard ice blue of each tile's face.

and with the sound of water emancipated from its sky cage, running wild like liquid hives you are not sweating red footed in the tub, you are sitting on rotted wood in the steel door night, with the black sea and the windy paper rain roping through your curved hands.