THE RAIN RUSTS ME

The rain has learned my name tonight,

and wears it like a funeral stain;

it falls through the ribs of heaven

and rusts what remains.

I walk where the streetlights tremble,

where the pavements swallow the rain,

with a heart gone cold and flavourless,

too tired to hurt again.

I chose the road with no ending,

the one that forgets where it goes;

I followed its broken black teeth

through the mud and the falling snow.

And every wrong turn knows me.

Every ghost knows my face.

They follow behind like old debts

I was never meant to erase.

The rain keeps rusting my body,

slowly, beneath my skin;

turning blood into iron,

turning loss into sin.

I smile at strangers in doorways,

I hum as the cold winds blow—

a man with nowhere to arrive at,

still pretending he knows where to go.

There are roses beneath the pavement,

but none of them bloom for me.

There are names I have buried in silence,

still breathing beneath the sea.

So let the rain keep falling.

Let the heavens corrode.

I have walked so far down the wrong road

that the wrong road feels like home.

And if morning should find me walking,

with rust upon my tongue,

don't ask where I am going—

I stopped going somewhere

a very long time ago.

I simply kept walking.

— enitnatsnoC oãoJ