Tied to the bed of spikes, he is now only in thirst. His tongue scrapes over his teeth, rasps against his lips, sticks to the roof of his mouth. There is no moisture he can bring up any more. Now we wishes only for rain, imagines it filling his mouth, drop after delicious drop, gulping it down, too much of it. Rain so thick and sweet.
And what of it, if it kills him?
They tied him to the bamboo frame yesterday, and then they left. Good men, simple men, men with compassion in their eyes. It is always good and simple men, doing a job, going home to their families. The one who bound him down nodded to him before he left. They would not see him again.
With his hands he had done things that were no lighter.
John Frusciante - Central - 2009
Think of the rate of growth – he thinks of all the bamboo under him, rustling with promise. Every day, three centimeters more of it, and it has to go somewhere. If it must, then it must go into him, break through his parchment skin, draw the thick blood from him, penetrate his organs, enter the cage of his heart. All of that promise is sleeping. Waiting ceaseless for the rain to push verdant and green into the upper air. Here he lies humming, suspended between the earth and the canopy of the jungle.
People need things, he thinks. They need water and they need vitamins and they need clothes for the children and they need to see the party they vote for win once in their lives and they need to see a perfectly round yellow moon. Sometimes, people need to see the person who hurt them punished. Which is why he is here, and he needs water.
Grant Lee Buffalo - Happiness - 1994
The whole world is thirsty. The ants are thirsty, and the worms, and rats and the snakes, whispering in the forest under him, also waiting for the rain. Nothing is thirstier than the bamboo that holds his world together. He is thirsty for water, but he is also thirsty for this immense green engine to move forward, for the sun to come down over the thicket where he lies, for the cicadas to cry out their song. Everything must rest in the end.
Pain is only the thinnest skin of consciousness. Deeper than pain and pleasure is need. Under need moves a thing only torturers know, that quiet motive force that chooses to come and go.
So he prays for rain.
