Not Like Rain

Perched here above life


Looking out on the fake majestic game


Manchester's pride and shame

I think bigger

And learn now a wider version of my world

How all interactions tilt into a grand design

Newly angled

Everything disentangled yet bound up

Not hopelessly bound up

Rather, hopefully intertwined

The shapes, curves and colours

Musically aligned

And for my ears

A power drill, three sirens, two cat calls,

That dense fascinating symphony of

A hundred car tyres rolling on tarmac

The robotic beep stutter of a vehicle reversing

The bustle of a million lives moving out

Dispersing

Factory sounds, school kids, the whirl flutter of a passing helicopter

Fragile bursts of song and spontaneous joy-strapped laughter cut short

At once shrill and drowning under new sounds ever after

And a thousand un-named dancing things

All meshed into a new collective and sent up to me

On arrival, so charged by urban fervour 


You could cut through with a knife

That distant radio of life

Was that Colin knocking on my door or oil men fracking thirty miles off ?

Long-wave sounds ricochet the subtlest of echoes

In this way I decipher the provenance of audio

And the night rain

Falling through the air in deep sweeping sighs

Not the sound of rain landing

But the hurl of its descent through the skies

Shy of contact

Unfettered and pure

Free as a bird

Not like rain you ever heard