EVERY DROP OF RAIN AS COLD

EVERY DROP OF RAIN AS COLD

Every drop of rain as cold

as a kiss on the forehead

of a dead baby in its coffin.

And I’m soaked through to the skin.

This rain can’t afford any more flowers.

This rain drives things in

instead of bringing them out.

Except for the madmen with nothing to lose

and right now I’m one of those.

My clothes clinging like a wet parachute

that candled on the way down

and got hung up on a powerline

instead of blooming

like morning glory on the vine.

I’m a Medusan jellyfish out of my depths.

I’m holding my head up like Caravaggio

to the Duke of Naples

full of regrets that it’s me in the flesh

and not one of my stand-in doubles.

I’ve got the whole of Stewart Park to myself.

No teen agers billowing from behind bushs.

It’s hard to keep a joint lit in the rain.

Just an hour

just an hour

to break the severe discipline

of living in pain

and counter-intuitively go utterly insane.

For good.

Never come back.

Never be what you should

because it doesn’t leave enough room for solitude.

For imagination.

For the spirit to forget it’s the spirit

and just lay down in the wet grass

like any other ordinary human in agony

in the crosshairs of the lightning

and spreading its wings as wide as my arms

ride freefall in front of the Confederate snipers

trying to shoot the stars out

like Kevin Kostner in Dances with Wolves.

Twice.

The first time in earnest.

The second in jest

just to prove that death

is only an evil clown

that people take too seriously.

Despair’s the back door to liberation.

A cold bath on the dark side of the moon.

Joy’s the doorbell at the front.

The happy debt-collector that comes once a month.

Apres moi le deluge.

No arks.

No two of every kind.

No doves sent out to look for land.

Just this shipwreck at the bottom of the sea

looking up at the sheet lightning

of its broken rigging

making neural connections between

the synaptic gaps in the grey matter of the clouds

like a panicked damage assessment

to see if I went down with the ship like a real captain

or one of the rats who jumped into a lifeboat

and threw the baby overboard

like a cradle in the treetops.

A cold wind burrs my skin

like the swan song of a sadistic lullaby.

I lie here obedient to nothing

because I refuse to die

until I’ve lived what I was born for.

And everybody who’s ever given up on themselves

like a bad drug that doesn’t make you happy knows

it wasn’t this.

PATRICK WHITE