Starfish

 

Heavy rain attacks the roof above me

Its weight and relentless strength lending it

A deep, bass thrum

A warm surround sound

I am drifting to sleep in the top room of the house

You are downstairs in the bedroom

With the kind of cough that would spell certain death

In a Victorian novel

Or literally any TV movie

Books look down at me from dark shelves

Their spines an amber ripple in a sliver of streetlight

From where the curtains don’t quite meet

They regard me, as if wondering what I’m doing

Here, at night

I’m a day visitor, surely?

An occasional friend who strokes their warm, sunlit spines

Pretending I might, one day, read them all

Despite having read precisely nine books in the whole of last year

Three of which were about Buffy the Vampire Slayer

I love the rain, though

Pounding sound through the ceiling above me 

And around me

Scattergun dancing across the tiles

The roar of a a displaced ocean

I’m warmer for it

Warmer than I would be on a Summer day

You cough, downstairs, through the floorboards

The gap between the cold of the rain

And the warmth of my covers

Is the gap between

The sadness that we’re apart

And the utter joy that I get to spread my arms and legs

Out like a mad starfish

A starfish

Drifting out to sea

Drifting

Stretching, further and further

Everything else goes away

But the sound of the waves

The cold and the warm

The noise of the rain