It was a great Open Mic Poetry night with the Whitchurch Poetry Group last night. Thank you to everyone at Percy's Café Bar for their warm welcome and for a wonderful evening of poetry. I made my debut performing a poem called It Smells Like Rain from my collection Stained Glass Lives and a new poem from a collection I'm working on. I look forward to the next time.
It smells like rain
It smells like rain, except it isn’t rain. It’s lies. It can’t smell like rain all the time.
‘You’re mistaken,’ he says again. ‘Deluded.’
Words come and go to him like a wet dog shaking itself free of wet. The drops go flying everywhere. It doesn’t matter where, just off, out of the fur.
‘Unavoidable,’ he says. ‘Work. Pressure.’
I am drenched with your words, by your tongue and the shake of your head that sends the wet drops flying at me, into me. Soaking me.
‘I hate being late, too,’ he says. ‘The traffic, the deadlines – one after the other. My boss. You do believe me, don’t you?’
When the rain comes, it isn’t metal-clean and pure. It is hard and heavy and tainted with sepia-like dye; everything it touches is slightly off. Coloured.
The rain falls on the breakfast table. It falls on the patio and over the garden furniture. It falls so easily, noiselessly, the dripping, the wetting, the leaking of falsehoods, half-truths, lies......