The Rains' Refrain

There is cold between my fingers and wet upon my head. This rain today, since yesterday, has poured with no relent. This pen gripped between my fingers the others to a cigarette. My ears collect jazz and the orchestra of the bitter night upon the wind's wings. My reflection is laid in every puddle, on every road, in the silver of the flooding ashtray, in the cafe window panes and bubble-gummed sidewalk. My eyes are glass and hazy where I couldn't wipe. And my coffee arrives, so hot and still and calming. I need thermals for my heart, iced over in anticipation of you and so imbued by the waiting and damp and mould.

Rain drums harder and becomes the only sound to drown out everything but you. The street is emptying as the tears cry uncontrollably and inconsolably and no one wants to bare their weight. Ink runs smear on my pages as I write my sorrows on table thirty eight. This getting wet is like nothing I've seen before or drank. It's a wretched downpour. But it eases and streams away the trash and umbrellas and splashes on all the cars and everything, giving it all that crystal, beady, pre-delivery new look. There are idiots in tshirts who huddle past under the eves and silly girls in track suit pants dragging their cuffs, which to my hate's a tease, still getting the saturation they deserve pleases me.

My coffee's flavour curves luke warm with the breeze and melts the danger in my mouth. And just like it all around me I can't get warm. I shiver and grit my teeth that chatter in time with the pitter-patter and think of you, when you last listened to my heartbeat and your counting aloud the pumps of the icy organ inside me. The notes it plays in refrain. Saying steady as the rain, goodbye. I'm this rain of refrain which will not subside. I'm all refrain, since yesterday.