Sleepless

and waiting for rain, balanced

on tomorrow's edge,

burnished with years and

caught somewhere between

regret and longing.

In darkness, through a mind

prised open after a chiseling

away of winter's edge, a

train rattles along tracks in

my head, carries me back to

childhood haunts which

haunt me still, while the

growing crescendo of freight

cars peaks and recedes into

sub-texts of other passages.

Rain comes as a sigh.

Like tea, it is a soporific

for things hardly felt, or

felt too much,

its steady fall blends with

memory's night sounds, with the

chaos in my head, drowning out

thoughts which flap like moths

against a porch light, attracted to

the split-second rush of life

towards death, towards the

oblivion of sleep.