Some people walk in the rain, others just get wet. – Roger Miller
I’m sitting on my balcony
in a pensive mood, the rain
augmenting recollection that’s
usually half-baked these days,
nebulous like the swirling greys
in a paperweight, I don’t have a
pluviophile’s tranquility, all I have
is an ache that longs to find its
way through the broken corridors
of the past, back to you, back to us,
when my life wasn’t a dastardly mash
of recklessness and impulse,
and I didn’t float in a wavy gravy
of regret, like a dead fly in a bowl of
soup, but I know that I’ll never find you
again, not in this world, fetching with
side-swept hair and a smile which gave
me more than any muse could,
sagacious like a blue jay with tiles
of greenish blue, making up its back,
accepting chance and circumstance with
equanimity even when the first signs
of the disease gnawed at you like
a hellish hound chewing raw meat,
the nystagmus and the pain in those
eyes that always seemed to look
through me, past bone and marrow
finding my soul and
animating my spirit,
the spasms which progressed into
all-encompassing throes,
your voice, an alto sweetness
becoming slurring strangeness.
I always believed some
coruscant hand of providence
or a kaleidoscopic divine fiat
would bring back the colour
you’d lost — the tender blues,
the wild greens, the burning oranges,
but insouciant fate
never rewarded me for the nights
spent on my knees, sobbing for mercy.
I watched as your condition deteriorated.
unable to walk or think,
a poor prognosis, they called it,
but it felt like some unholy beast
wielding a monstrous axe hacking
away at my heart, and you, once a
sequoia symbolising vivaciousness
even when the auburn eventide
played its requiem, now
a shadow, fighting to become flesh
and blood again, resisting until you
couldn’t any longer and the world’s
cathedral lost a beautiful mural
making this sinner fight his
demons with the bottle, which
became a demon itself,
lucidity drifting in and out like
consciousness after an accident,
chaos and then anger, and then
a settled sadness, pinpricks of
sorrow. The moonlight floods
the balcony and I wish it would
carry me with it until I’m something
unquantifiable and infinite,
but also nothing —
dust and ashes, sky and rain.
For dVerse
Photo by Max Bender on Unsplash
Ordinary Person 
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