Rainy 21st

My 21st birthday
I got on the bus in the rain
Fare get me there
Wet clothes and bodies
Smell of going to work

Wandering into traffic’s roar
Four legged fur turned into gore
Some inner child’s friend
Meets a beautiful end
All red and shiney
From head to hiney
Jackson Pollock in
The passing lane
No lasting stain –
Deleted by rain

Bus bogs down
Before uptown
Job’s gotta keep
Water too deep to get there

Shielded from the deluge
By personal shelter
I wade for hearth and home

Yearn to burn
To stoke the smoke
To transcend
Oppression fighter
My butane lighter
Burns a whole in my umbrella
As inner Ella
Belts tisket and tasket
The scene becomes elastic
I rise above the lack of love
The City falls away and
Saunters slowly below

Stormclouds
Dark, torn and ragged
Spill their guts out over the town
Weigh down
They wash the leaves on the trees
And very soon
The flowers
They will bloom

And now I find myself
Blown out of the City
Out over the suburbs
With the rain water
Washing back
Back to more familiar ground

(And the Breeze takes me gently home
  Please take me home)

On my 21st birthday
It was raining
And a very good rain it was.