The rain has learned my name tonight,
and wears it like a funeral stain;
it falls through the ribs of heaven
and rusts what remains.
I walk where the streetlights tremble,
where the pavements swallow the rain,
with a heart gone cold and flavourless,
too tired to hurt again.
I chose the road with no ending,
the one that forgets where it goes;
I followed its broken black teeth
through the mud and the falling snow.
And every wrong turn knows me.
Every ghost knows my face.
They follow behind like old debts
I was never meant to erase.
The rain keeps rusting my body,
slowly, beneath my skin;
turning blood into iron,
turning loss into sin.
I smile at strangers in doorways,
I hum as the cold winds blow—
a man with nowhere to arrive at,
still pretending he knows where to go.
There are roses beneath the pavement,
but none of them bloom for me.
There are names I have buried in silence,
still breathing beneath the sea.
So let the rain keep falling.
Let the heavens corrode.
I have walked so far down the wrong road
that the wrong road feels like home.
And if morning should find me walking,
with rust upon my tongue,
don't ask where I am going—
I stopped going somewhere
a very long time ago.
I simply kept walking.
— enitnatsnoC oãoJ