When It Rains, My Darling, It Pours

Inartful, the note she left for me, tired, wounded last, fatefully by her own doing.

Expired — the kind word for it. 

Leaving me tremulous, ruinous in my abysmal ruing.

So I breathed life into her laconic letter, 

and then she came to me, in elegy,

once at last she came to be, though dead and soon buried,

before her soul to the netherworld was fatefully ferried.

She died somewhere, someone said. She had been lost, in her father's house. 

Like a house fly in the window sill, unnoticed, like a quiet poisoned mouse. 

A life lived obscure and hidden, so rarely ever full, lived in various phases of the moon.

She denied her own beauty, yet used it for attention, and lost her soul in pieces, far too steeply paid, and far too soon.

And these jackals who have scraps of her still in their teeth, who gave her their petty worthless affections,

scurry now to another the way they were once to her — ghastly parasitic infections.

We spoke in the shadows of a very cold and lonely delirious dream

in which I saw her with bleary eyes, my mouth agape, this frightful rape of my senses of which there is no escape.

Though despite the horror, I couldn't scream out to fracture the dream. 

The shock, too overwhelming, for in my sorrow I was drowning,

which could explain the phantasm that was my love, by the purpling window of her head, moonlight crowning. 

When it rains, my darling, it pours —

the only scribbled words of her note

that she recited again as there in that room near the drawn drapes I watched her float. 

And miffed because I swore my senses had been so wickedly defiled,

by the sick wanton grief and misery of her death, my naivety, I reviled —

and subsequently the delusion of her specter that didn't flinch, ne'er an inch,

as I trembled there in my robe, so pitifully and dubiously beguiled. 

How she came, I was befuddled —

through which sealed window or through which of the two locked doors.

But she simply repeated that terse and languid verse that I had read so ruefully before —

When it rains, my darling, it pours.

And mad, long past mad, as a late hour on the grandfather clock so mockingly tolled,

that once so favored me, and of all my reveries and my love laying naked beside me, enviously extolled,

I began to cry and argue with her apparition, to expel her from my house forevermore —

to leave me be, let me go, take pity upon me the bawling, weeping, sad man cast like a dejected shadow upon his own bedroom floor,

where once we knew all the pleasures of love, as intimate as we had been.

Thieves of such pleasure no more, 

and she, that I now so dejectedly abhor, lost yet again. 

But now how I considered it, her ruin, because of it, her damnation if it is so to be,

as I sit and write of her last unholy trespass and a befitting, yet befuddling, eulogy, only to realize,

there is but no one else for me. 

I half-expected her to apologize, as I sat to eulogize her, 

but it wasn't like her in the least,

to be either courteous or mindful, or more than anything but a beautiful, boorish beast. 

She remained there at that window fixed, and I stumbling as though drunk, a borish buffoon, a thin-legged lummox, 

at last rose to my encumbered feet.

And I accepted that she was indeed she, as those horrible words she recited, so delicate yet uninvitedly, 

once again she did so dreadfully repeat —

When it rains, my darling, it pours.

And though she must be a figment of my imagination, a hallucination brought about by this frought and dehabilitating condition

of my overhwlming grief, I could deny her no more. 

I welcomed her into my room as I had so many times before when she breathed and when her heart beat, if ever it did at all, 

when she was not so dour, and I not so appalled. 

But all those times, which now I could see were but a price paid to a final hour

that had been counted and so sadly taxed and tolled,

as her life had passed, and into the darkness of that we know of not, she was pushed or pulled. 

And I argued with her as one might to encourage a child to keep faith.

What a comedy it must have been to see a man urging and pleading with a loveless wraith —

that of my beloved lost love, my unfaithful darling lover,

who had never been in love with me at all, for she could never love another. 

Yet, I loved her still, despite a myriad of betrayals, and her countless unwarranted treasons. 

And it went on, and it went on, and I loved her unrequited, mindless of reasons.

An unfaithful lover, and the lover who loved her most,

but now one delirious, yet living, and the other, a lingering, yet listless ghost. 

She was neither loyal nor honest by any stretch of measure,

but I knew with her what I knew not with any other, the greatest of all the rarest of pleasures. 

That relief which no other so generously afforded me, nor so tenderly. 

How will I do without you in that way, I thought to ask her, shamefully.

But I loved her for the intimacy, as I plead senslessly to her, "My love thou art,"

knowing all the while, as I did when she lived, that I loved her, but at the expense of my heart. 

When it rains, my darling, it pours, she so sadly repeated.

I recall her now telling me this sometime before as my sanity fastly depleted. 

When she were naked and living and I was getting dressed,

and she were at the window as she is now, as she then candidly confessed. 

And how I didn't listen to her at all, how I made a joke or ignored the sadness in her tone, that ominous pall.

That veil she wore so often as though it were skin, and tried to mend through sex and sin.

How I just let her drift away, 

quite sure she would come back happier, tomorrow, if not another day. 

When it rains, my darling, it pours —

But that one time, I argued, when we had a time at the bar, and you were witty.

When everything was beautiful and rhymed, and you were so glamorous in the dress I bought you, so gloriously pretty.  

The night that we hoped would never end.

When all the doors opened and the glasses stayed full

and warmth rode like a chariot upon a charitable wind.  

I keep a memory of it for there is a scrapbook of you in my head,

full of not only pictures, stills of your smiling perfect face, but of words spoken, all the pretty things we said. 

So many pretty things that can never be undone —

words that were uninterrupted, that were spoken on a night in which no webs the spiders spun.

When it rains, my darling, it pours,

she ignores. 

I regretted all the times we argued, most. 

Of all the men and the litany of whores 

of which one can or cannot in certain company boast. 

How you cried for attention and how you spoke of your depression once so perfectly —

Melancholy hits with fists. It is a bare knuckle barage until I'm bloody and morose, defeated and swollen 

and from any previous inclination of happiness, marauded and stolen.

Murdered of all apetites, belittled, bed-ridden and savagely bitten.

My eulogy, will leave its audience depressed as me, if adequately ever written. 

When it rains, my darling, it pours, she pounds. 

Her funeral was in an hour. So I left the words alone. Left them as plainly as they were read

and looked out at her other lovers, and read what she wrote, what last words she must have, without me, said. 

I wondered if she had ever said those words to any of them —

various forms of the lowliest of men. 

Desperate scoundrels and unscrupulous thieves of souls —

fat, goofy, licentious, odd in some unenchanting way, buffoons, obtuse, odious fools.

But they weren't there at all, those villains and rogues who had their way,

or who sought to inveigle from her that which they could never repay.

I simply saw them from memories of seeing them in passing, or in images on her phone.

I don't know if it would have been sadder if they had come, or that they didn't and left her, at last, alone. 

Where are all your lovers now, that you would expect to pay respect to you that they didn't ever have or keep?

To mourn you in a casket for that eternity they swore they would adore you, yet where they now let you, at last, sleep.

And here before me you lie in full and complete dress 

not sending nudes, no longer precarious and naked in inebriated states of mental duress —

Where have they all gone, my darling?

All those fine and loyal men, such that they were in all of their lubricious invasions.

There ought to be a line out the door for you, of all your men and their ridiculous persuasions. 

But not a peep from one, there is no one but me to weep.

I would be civil but civility would be libelous and these empty seats are but that which you, my darling, reaped.

When it rains, my darling, it pours.  

But I didn't say that which I ought, that which was so richly deserved after I spent five years so reserved.

I spoke of only this and that, those times when you were sane, and happy, as though I sought to perserve 

something that was bound to fall.

Some grand delusion, that which you cast upon me, that which wasn't ever at all. 

Yet, how sickly I became without you, 

the thought of you ferried to hell.

The thought of myself lonely, living alone with only the scent of you left for me to tell that you ever were here at all.

How quickly "what is" becomes "what was,"

is what disturbs me most. 

And that night I returned to my house cast with such a pallor that one might have mistaken me for the ghost. 

And I lied in bed, neither alive nor dead,

my eyes fluttering as the evening died outside of that window where you were before,

and as I smell your hair on my pillow and your skin on the sheets, you come no more. 

And a tear rolls down the curve of my sallow cheek, to a pillow sodden by the heaviness of my looming death.

I died of a brokenheart, and like a house fly on a window sill or a poisoned mouse, I breathed my last breath. 

A reprieve from life, so to see you once more 

and perhaps to better love you than I ever loved you before.

When it rains, my darling, it pours —

no more. No more.