As if he didn't hear...

The rain was too much of a coward to fall steadily, to bear down on the city, ravish it with its rhythms. Only bouts of grayness spreading over the buildings, through the lindens & across the eaves. Cars like whispers in the mist. He walked around trying to pretend as if he didn't hear the tension in the voices that emerged from the blindness all around him, the wrath that reared up from each vagrant call, each motherly admonition, the unfathomable pleas to a sky so long blanketed in its own petty tears that no pitch could rouse the light to release itself over the bodies that groped down the street as if it were a tunnel unto the gate of dawn.