The rain seemed heaviest when the streetlights dimmed and doorways clapped shut, like pointed turtle beaks.

I was a child drowning within a sea of faded street signs and wind-pulled swing chains.

The tarred pebbles of the street, still damp from the shower's tease, gently clenched the tread of my sneaker; hot bubble gum nested into lips chapped.

Home is simply the close of a day and a distant enough destination for an idling mind to lock onto.

The seconds under the watch inhale time by the hours, twirling around days in a spinning eddy, slipping through the rusted grate of a kitchen basin.

The winner's tape hung taut across the finish line in the distance, its tassels tied into knots across the rattling bars of another starting gate.

Blind eagerness to arrive again to nowhere, abounded.

Sprinting to clench the blue ribbon of tissue with sweat-bathed palms, they prayed for the promised applause to echo back against their deaf ears.

Just as the next foot lowered to the road, as a thinly sewn bed linen would fall atop a waiting mattress, the baton dropped from my fist.

Life is only witnessed between the grumbles of a sleeping distraction.

High above the muddy table of our refusal to think lays a patchwork of ideas and questions, an ebony pregnancy of curiosity that gives breath to the first question for a better anything.

After the last wave of dizzy sunlight dripped down from the sky, like a wisp of creamy smoke pulled through a faceless vent, the sight above became a blanket of stars and moons that united its audience; faces of familiar strangers stepping out from our dreams.

Written within the glow of a permanent black evening, pop stark yellow splashes as they exploded onto the midnight mosaic.

Each touch of the brush slapping exactly different from the last, painted the same scene atop the same canvas until it reflected the same questions I had asked inside it as a boy.

As the paint started to set this evening, a beautiful awareness met questions across a thousand oceans and common grounds atop charcoal puffs of a cloudy haze.

Silence of the motivated "Everything at once" and "Everything is mine", slowed the decay of the ignorant runners, delayed the pause, and sprinkled down sands from a shattered hourglass to awaken the sleeping awe and beauty that slumbered under a roaring fire of confused ambition.

That night, we gazed upon a working masterpiece through the eyes of one family, as it was before He wet his brush and as it will be tomorrow when it is dry.