the raining library 

warm water like a shower pours around me
& everyone's drenched, t-shirts stuck to skin,
jeans dark & heavy with water. i have this
re-occurring dream where it's raining 
in a library. everyone there ignores 
the rain & ambles through the library,
shoes squeaking on the tile floors. 
it's not an ordinary looking library
though it's got all these mismatched
stairs going into the ceiling & trees
thick arms growing out of the book shelves. 
do you think it's possible to choose
a dream to go to when we die? i think
there's enough in the raining library
to keep me occupied, even if i went
entirely alone. i'm telling you about
the library though so that if given
the choice you might consider it too.
in the dream i never get time to open 
a book but i think if i did 
i could watch the words wash away 
in the down pour, gushing like
bitten watermelon. they would be 
sweet too, if i licked my fingers
after holding on. maybe my afterlife's
work would be to build a pool at
the bottom of the library to catch
all the words. the water would
change colors but always be a shade
of mud, like the creek after a storm.
down there all us visitors 
of the library could fill 
our miscellaneous coffee mugs
& drink from the pool, snippets 
of books & conversations glimmering
through our bodies. we would live 
like this & the rain would never 
stop & none of our skin would
wrinkle like prunes. always i wake up 
from this dream & have to resist the urge 
to pull all my books off the shelf
& lay them on the sidewalk,
waiting for rain. i settle on putting
an old dictionary in the shower,
running warm water over it
it watch the words leak 
our slowly & then rushing 
like a waterfall. i should
have collected the words but
watching them seep away 
was too wonderful. in the library
i would eventually need to die 
another time, i think. we would
make it a ritual to drop the dead 
in the pool, let the rain pelt
them until they'd sink 
to the bottom where they'd 
come apart into words, all
the words they'd every spoken
& again everyone else would
drink & get fragments of 
those words, even the most strange
& wonderful. i'd hope that someone
would taste that time we talked
about living in a house boat
or maybe that time we decided 
that we would be emperor penguins 
if given the choice of any 
other animal. after the raining library
dream i have to change my clothes,
i wake up soaked in warm rain water
& as i do i wonder what i could
do to get it to rain in the house 
like that. rain all the time.
rain beneath each of your fingers
rain under tables & desks & lamps.
rain in closets & in the back seat
of the car. rain from the roof
of my mouth & under every tooth
& not just in libraries.