Monsoon – Thomas Heath

On a pier of grey stones and lightbulbs, with
splintered wood under my shoes
sailing ships grapple waves.
I’m alone until the monsoon pulls
me out with the tide and washes away
the external thing I call ‘me’.

Collapsing, free-form falling rain
shatters in my hair in
newly-made shards.

The ships sift fiercely through
upturned water, surfacing
embryos in rain.

Deep into the shimmering low, the sea
sings like a whale born
fresh to the punitive world,
I listen to the old spirits.

Take in a painful breath,
that flows through spaces between my
veins, my lungs, flows through spaces
in between hands that hold each other, between
arms that grasp each other in winter coats.

Exhale a cloud that reaches
into cold canvas, touching
the fringes of the black railing,
to feel motion in the air,
as if I, and what I have known, are the same.

On a pier of grey stones and lightbulbs,
I conjure spectres from the sonic past
in torrential, satellite rain.

They come from city streets
and front rooms and TV sets and gardens
and offices and old, gone mining towns.
The spaces in between

are never empty; they brim
bulge with memory and sound.

In a downpour of minutes,
rumbling, I listen.

Remembering is watching a laptop tumble like a
pearl from a block of flats until
you realise it belongs to you.

It’s keeping Lego blocks for no
other reason than that
they were once yours.

I put my hands in pockets to go
catch a train, under mythical skies messy
with clouds and daylight.

I listen to the sea,
its holy drone, its lo-fi hum,
to the spaces in between,
to the waves, to the rain.

the waves
the rain

to the sea