Scattered Showers (A Permanent Twilight Before the Altar)

The sound of cars in the distance, light in mid-spring rain. Sounds like years ago. The road remembering.
Drifting in and out of sleep. The open window.
The interior of a church. Musty brown. Old prayer books, the scent of attics, of mad old King James bible uncertainties.
The permanent twilight before the altar.
I wind through paths through still woods. Green rain and rivers. Somewhere.
Sleep and drift.
Tides shift.

Something someone told me. I hear his voice quiet and urgent, a whisper. Some tale whose words I can't translate. Are you speaking in another language? Cold hills in the distance. All I hear is the insistence of his words but not the actual words.
Look up at the sun.
Obscured, I shiver.
Lie sleeping on the bed.

Tides shift.

The smell of petrol and petrol stations. There are always wastelands behind petrol stations, a geography of tyres and streams that flow nowhere else but here.
You disappeared didn't you? Years ago?
Some vague recognition there. A photograph I saw in the local paper. Mill town echoes, factory stories.
The rain is fooling me.
Its like I haven't spoken in days.
These scattered showers make voices a quiet song.

Like choirs.
Like your insistence.
Like the hill.

The empty landing, and I am thinking suddenly of boats and harbours and places far away from this rain and this memory and this drifting on a bed in a tiny room, unable to fully wake.
It sounds cold out there on the landing.

The sound of cars in the distance.

(The song 'Scattered Showers' by Disco Inferno can be found on the EP 'The Last Dance'. The above piece is based on images inspired by the song, which I have listened to almost continually over this Spring-haunted Christmas of 2011).