Our exterior will always be deceiving
The feathers that round our bodies
And bulk our muscles defend us
From the world that wouldn’t mind laughing
At a four pound “killing” machine

They would enjoy seeing the strength drain away
All joy in still solitude forsaken by deadly silence
And our own ****** mastery becomes wrapped
In the live mummifications of our failures
Screaming truth to the saying
Life is best taken with a grain of salt.

It’s really a feeble attempt to make something between one and five work in our daily lives. They have gone from an intriguing idea and amount of worth to a silly little gift grandparents hand out freely on Valentine’s Day along with a card worth more than the contents. They've never set foot in any wallet of mine; they simply always made their way back behind my socks. The valuable of least worth I owned was never spent strictly based on rarity. These days you are a mistake just like all the other rarer coins like that three-legged buffalo nickel only I could maybe pay a bit of college tuition with one of those. You can bring in about four Lira though; enough to get a big bowl of any kind of noodles and sauce they have down at that restaurant in Istanbul near the Grand Bazaar. That night I stopped a little closer to my hotel and spent my last four on a beer with my meal. We kept walking and saw that young boy shivering as always against the cold vents that produced less heat than my freezer back home. No change jingled in my pockets because I had eaten my fill. A thousand suns heated my back without that jacket but the warmth was bitter like stolen Turkish Delights. I couldn't tell if he was going to drape that jacket around his tiny body or have it stolen by one of the bigger kids. We still spoke though. I know that was the day I discovered the language of the universe.

You want a recipe to stop the rain altogether? The ingredients are plenty simple; all you really need is a beautiful girl. Now this might take a little while as you have to meet this girl and just fall head over heels for her. You have to be absolutely positively hopelessly lost in love with her; so in love with her in fact, that it hurts just to be around her because you’re not with her but it’s even more painful not seeing her because you can’t imagine that kind of life without her. There’s nothing wrong with it and eventually you’ll find her. There’s step number one.
Your next ingredient is the next rainy day you have a chance to get. The key is to make sure it’s a really good one, an absolutely perfect downpour that mixes all the fantastic beauty of a thunderstorm and just enough rain to get pretty **** close to a flash flood. You bring her to a park or even the middle of a hardly used street somewhere. This is where you put it all together. Take her in your arms and dance with her; it doesn't matter how good you are and it doesn't matter what kind of music you threw on in your car, the point is that you just dance with her. Then you stop, draw her close, and kiss her; I promise you, the rain’s going to stop altogether.

The night was
Our curtain

As I moved for
The kiss

With the rain as
Our walls

And the thunder
Our passion

                                                        ­                   The instant then passed by
                                                              ­                  Like the lightning so
                                                              ­                             Mute

                                                           ­              And the storm must carry on
                                                              ­                  But for now it bears
                                                           ­                                  fruit