Making sense of everything

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