Category: literature promotion

‘Sirens,’ a Horror Novella, Chapter Three

Two nights later, reporter Nancy Sayers got a tip about another accident, this time just outside a warehouse near downtown Sulla. She raced over there in her car. She arrived about twenty minutes later.

A crowd surrounded the police, the paramedics, and the accident victim. Some crates were piled near the crowd; she climbed up a few of them so she could see. The victim, a young white male, was impaled through the belly on the left of the raised blades of a forklift. The paramedics were trying to remove the body from the blade; blood was splattered everywhere.

“Oh, God!” she gasped, wincing at the sight.

A bicycle lay on its left side just by the forklift and immediately after a huge pothole. Nancy assumed that it was the victim’s, him having fallen after hitting the pothole.

He must have been drunk or stoned not to have seen such a big pothole, she thought.

“Come on, all of you!” a police officer shouted. “Make room, clear the way! We’ve gotta get the body to the coroner, and we can’t do that with all you people in the way!”

The young man’s body was on a stretcher now and being carried into the ambulance. The crowd was dispersing, except for a few reporters.

“No reporters!” the cop said angrily. “Get outta here. I’ll answer your questions at the station. I won’t have much to say beyond what we see here, because I have to wait for the coroner’s report. C’mon, people. Go!”

Nancy noticed that the forklift blade the boy’s body had been impaled on was chipped and jagged at the edge. Small wonder it cut clean through the body. But why would such a defective forklift be kept for use at a warehouse?

***************

Two days after writing up and publishing her brief, initial story on the death–which didn’t have much to say beyond the fact that the young man’s name was Tor, he was 23, and it was his bike–she heard the coroner’s report. As with Ari, Tor was neither drunk nor stoned at the time of the accident.

How could a sober guy have missed that pothole? she wondered. I interviewed his parents just before publishing my story, and they said he had no suicidal or self-destructive tendencies at all. He was always a happy boy. Just like Ari, this was an accident that should never have happened. It makes no sense at all!

The time of death was estimated at about 6:30 in the evening, a pretty accurate estimate given how quickly his body was discovered and sent to the coroner, about 10:00 that night. There were clear signs of lividity in Tor’s body, but rigour mortis hadn’t set in yet, so he couldn’t have been dead for more than three to four hours upon discovery of his body.

The bicycle was definitely his, for Nancy learned from her interview of his parents that they’d bought it for him as a birthday gift a year ago. Since he’d been riding his bike at around 6:30 in the evening, the sun hadn’t set yet, so Tor had plenty of light to see that large pothole in the road by the forklift. He was perfectly sober, and known to be an excellent bicyclist–he had won several trophies in bike races in his teens, and habitually rode every day.

It doesn’t make any sense at all that he hadn’t noticed the pothole, she thought. Yet it seems he rode right into it, causing him to fly off his bike and onto the forklift blade.

As odd as it was that the blade he hit had a jagged edge, it was even odder to see the blades raised up to about five feet in the air.

It was as though someone had premeditated, planned out his death, she thought. What living person could have done such a fantastic thing? It was like something right out of The Omen, a conspiracy of demons.

Then, Nancy remembered Ari’s accident, and how odd that death was.

Nah, they couldn’t be connected, she thought. I’m thinking crazy now.

‘Sirens,’ a Horror Novella, Chapter Two

THE SULLA DAILY NEWS

MOTORCYCLIST KILLED IN HIGHWAY ACCIDENT

September 2, 2020

by Nancy Sayers

Last night, at about 11:30, Ari Schneider, 22, was riding his Yamaha Midnight Star motorbike down Route 36 between Sulla and Carupton when, inexplicably, he suddenly swerved into the opposing lane and crashed into an approaching semi-trailer truck. His body went under the wheels and was torn in half.

An autopsy revealed no drugs in his body, only a very small amount of alcohol, far too little for him to have lost control the way he did. The truck driver claims he had “an ear-to-ear grin” on his face, and his eyes were “squeezed shut” just before the collision. Yet he was hardly intoxicated at all, in spite of appearances.

“He looked like he was interacting with friends on his bike,” the truck driver, Ben Lewiston, said. “But no one was on the bike with him, and he wasn’t wearing headphones or a microphone to be talking with anyone else. I was surprised to hear that he wasn’t drunk or stoned. He must have been mentally ill or something.”

His family members, however, insist he had no mental health issues at all. “He never had a suicidal inclination of any kind,” his father, Lee Schneider, said. “Nor was he ever prone to hallucinating, not in the slightest. There is no reason for him at all to have thrown himself under that truck. It was so easily avoidable an accident. He was more or less sober. How could this have happened?”

A private funeral is being arranged for him for next week.

‘Sirens,’ A Horror Novella, Chapter One

The three beauties just appeared out of nowhere. Ari couldn’t believe his luck. He was standing at the bar of the dance club, waiting for the bartender to give him his beer, when the three young women walked up to him, all three of them grinning. Then they asked his name.

And now he had all three of them on his motorcycle. He was taking them on a highway towards his apartment. His bike was big enough to fit all three of them on it.

Ari couldn’t believe his luck.

All three women had wavy, shoulder-length hair: a blonde, a brunette, and a redhead. All three wore tight, sleeveless dresses that showed plenty of cleavage and went only half-way down their upper legs. The blonde wore black, the brunette wore red, and the redhead wore gold. Their high heels matched the colour of their dresses. The brunette wore black fishnet stockings.

And now they were all on his bike. Unbelievable luck.

They hadn’t said much to each other in the dance club. Though he’d drunk only the one beer, he was feeling a kind of intoxication the whole time he was with the girls.

It was strange, but why would he have cared? He was about to get the most amazing lay of his life. As he looked up at the starry, moonlit night, he imagined how the reverse gang-bang was going to be: him fucking one pussy, licking the second pussy, and fingering the third? Or would he fuck one of them while watching the other two do each other, then they’d all switch positions?

He felt a strange, buzzing, tingling vibration with those girls all around him. It felt amazingly good, too good to be suspicious about. It was like swimming in a sea of pleasure, the wavy ‘water’ soothing his whole body.

And those girls, with their curves, round asses, and huge tits! Their faces brightly painted to perfection! And they wanted him! He didn’t even have to do much work to take them home with him. It was more like them pursuing him than the traditional vice versa.

As he’d danced with them on the crowded dance floor, their hips grinding together, he could hear them singing in his ears, a beautiful, perfect three-part vocal harmony with the techno music and its pounding rhythms surrounding him. The other people dancing around him were looking at him strangely, as if he were making a fool of himself.

What’s their problem? he wondered as he felt the blonde’s ass rubbing against his pointy crotch. Haven’t they ever seen a guy dirty dancing with three hot chicks before? I’ll bet they’re just envious.

Now, all three of them were with him on his bike, the blonde in front, her ass grinding on his hard lap again. The brunette was immediately behind him, her arms around his chest, her fingers tickling his nipples. The redhead was behind her, of course, and as he could see from his rear-view mirrors, she had her arms around the brunette, her hands cupping her tits.

As he raced down the highway, on a lonely, open road, he could hear them singing again. It was odd that they would sing like that, but it was such pretty, seductive music. Hearing it made him feel as if he were high on ecstasy.

I’m still driving OK, he reassured himself.

He felt those intoxicating, wave-like vibes going around and through his body, undulating to the cadence of the three women’s singing. Sometimes the bike veered a little to the left–to the lane for oncoming traffic–or to the right shoulder of the road, near a ditch, but he generally kept control.

“What’s with all the singing, girls?” he shouted out.

“Don’t you like it?” the brunette asked.

“Well, yeah, but…” he began.

“Go faster!” the blonde shouted. “It gets me hot! Faster!“

“OK.” He sped up.

“How much longer till we get to your place?” the redhead shouted.

“Oh, about another twenty minutes or so,” he said.

“Faster!” the blonde shouted again. He went faster.

“You sure live far away from the city,” the redhead said.

“Yeah, I do,” he said.

“Faster!” the blonde shouted. He sped up again, and the girls resumed their singing.

There’s that beautiful singing again, he thought, not noticing the huge truck that was approaching in the opposing lane. Oh, those good vibrations…

He veered into the truck’s lane, so charmed was he by the singing that he was oblivious to what he had done. Those undulating, blurry vibes moving before his eyes and massaging every muscle in his body made him forget everything that was actually happening around him.

The singing continued.

That truck was getting closer.

The driver gave several urgent honks of his horn, but Ari didn’t hear them at all. The girls’ singing was drowning out every other sound in the area.

He was grinning to the beautiful harmony of their singing, as were the girls. His eyes were closed…as were the girls’.

“What the fuck is wrong with that guy?” the truck driver said, still honking his horn. “He must be stoned!”

He tried to slow the truck down and swerve out of Ari’s way, but it was too late: the bike skidded and tipped to the right, for only at the last split-second did Ari finally see what danger he was in. The very last thing he felt was his pelvis being crushed under the wheels of the truck.

And the three beauties just disappeared into nowhere.

‘Experiment,’ a Poem by Jason Morton

Here is another poem by my friend, Jason Morton, whose work I’ve written about a number of times before. Again, as before, I’m putting his poem in italics to distinguish his writing from mine:

Shattered symmetry
Breaking every side I thought i held
No longer one
I can’t see through my broken eyes
Everything I once held true
Is no longer real or harmonised
Every lip every kiss
Every touch and every finger tip
Don’t!
Touch!
Me!
I can’t shatter anymore than this
It is so visual
And the high
Is residual
Where Lucifer claims me
I fall where my blood Cascades
And puddles beneath me
In a moment I am but a breath away
From transparency….

And now, for my analysis.

The title ‘Experiment’ may seem at odds with the content of the poem, but when you consider the etymological origin of the word–it comes from the Latin experimentum (‘a test, a trial,’), which in turn comes from experiri, ‘to try, test,’ from ex, ‘out of’ and peritus (‘experienced, tested’), from the root per-, ‘to try, risk’–we can see a plausible relationship between title and poem. The poet has tried things, tested them, had experiences, and has had disastrous results.

The trauma and pain of life’s experiences, tests, and trials has resulted in psychological fragmentation for the poet. Everything has broken apart for him: he is “No longer one.” Normally, the danger of fragmentation is averted by caregivers, lovers, and friends, who empathically mirror and validate one’s feelings and experiences; but in the case of the poet, these would-be empathic mirrors, or what Heinz Kohut called self-objects, have failed him.

So he “can’t see through [his] broken eyes,” which are broken mirrors reflecting those shattered ones that failed to empathize and validate his feelings. Fragmentation can lead to a lost sense of reality. Nothing is “harmonised”; all is discord for him. In the second line, we see a deliberate use of a lower-case i, which symbolically expresses this sense of a broken self.

Those body parts and actions that normally express love and empathy, “Every lip every kiss/Every touch and every finger tip,” he is deprived of them, so he rejects any subsequent attempt to show affection for fear that such attempts are fake. They seem deceptions meant to betray his trust once again. Hence, “Don’t!/Touch!/Me!” Even these three words are broken apart, each given its own, separate line, divided with the exclamation marks of violent shouting.

After being rejected from the outside world, after experiencing frustrations from out there, one tends to respond with the defence mechanism of splitting, of breaking up objects (both internal and external) into black-and-white opposites of absolute good and bad, then expelling the bad halves to protect oneself from the pain. When taken to extremes, this splitting, this rejecting of so many parts of oneself, can result in one feeling as if he has little of himself left, hence the danger of fragmentation. Hence, the poet “can’t shatter anymore than this”.

There is a fleeting pleasure in rejecting, the relief of not having anyone around to hurt oneself, if only for the moment. Thus, “the high/Is residual”. The kind of pain typically felt is the trauma personified by “Lucifer,” the devilish inner critic, Freud‘s overbearing superego. Lucifer (‘light-bringer’), was a beautiful angel before he was cast out of heaven and thenceforth known as Satan. His goodness turned into overweening pride; thus Lucifer is a perfect metaphor for the self-righteous, cruel inner critic.

This inner critic “claims” the poet, making him “fall where [his] blood Cascades/And puddles beneath [him]”. Capitalized ‘Cascades’ suggests (if only unconsciously, like a parapraxis in typing) the many waterfalls in the world, in turn suggesting a huge outpouring of blood, so great is the poet’s pain and loss from so much splitting and projecting of unwanted objects.

“In a moment [he is] but a breath away/From transparency….” Since he “can’t shatter anymore than this,” his fragmentation is approaching disintegration. He is almost transparent because he is about to vanish. Pain and trauma can lead to the extremes of psychotic panic. These problems indicate how imperative it is not to trivialize psychological trauma. Mental illness is on the rise, and for many reasons, including some that I’ve complained about in many blog posts.

Let’s hope the poet can bring the pieces back together, and soon.

‘Time,’ a Poem by Jason Morton

Here’s another poem by Jason Morton, whose work I’ve analyzed before. I’ve put the text in italics to distinguish it from my own writing.

Time

Everything
Is nothing
It’s the truth of time
Where songs are sung by the dead
And then are transformed into lullabies
Nothing
Is everything
It’s sad to say this is true
Where hearts were giving in surrender
And I once cared for you
Now I let go
Never will i trust again
And i reach the end
Soul divine
In a matter of perspective
I perceive the threat of time.

And now, for my analysis.

“Everything/Is nothing” can be interpreted to mean that everything in life is inherently worthless; but I tend to see it dialectically, as Hegel did in his Science of Logic. He used ‘being,’ ‘nothing,’ and ‘becoming’ to represent an example of what is popularly labelled ‘thesis, antithesis, and synthesis.’

The point is that time, like everything, is in constant movement, and so things constantly arise and pass away. Everything becomes nothing, then nothing becomes new things, or a new set of everything, so “Nothing/Is everything.” So we move from everything to nothing, then back again, in cycles. What is so painful about time is seeing the people and things we love die off. Also, new pains emerge from nothingness.

Chronos, the personification of time, which consumes everything, changing it into nothing, has sometimes been equated with Cronus, or Saturn, who in Greek myth devoured his children. This eating of children can be associated with the ravages of destructive time.

Life is painful because those things we want to have last forever, cannot. “Songs are sung by the dead/And then are transformed into lullabies”: these are the dreams we have of what we’ve lost coming back to us in a wish-fulfillment. But when we wake up, we see our dreams were illusions, “Where hearts were giving in surrender.”

Note how when the writer “let[s] go,” the first-person I changes to lower-case i. This is deliberate: “Never will i trust again/And i reach the end.” Lower-case i here can be see to represent a standing human figure, but with the head separate from the body, indicating a fragmented soul. He’ll never again trust the love of one who has betrayed him, be that a former lover, or the God he’s lost faith in.

“Soul divine” thus could be an ironic reference to a Christian belief now abandoned, or to the divine beauty of a lost love, or it could be a reference to mythical Saturn, in whom one “perceive[s] the threat of time.” After all, nothing kills more slowly, more softly, more painfully, than time.

My Body Horror Short Story, ‘Blue,’ Published in the July Issue of the Terror Tract E-zine

I originally published ‘Blue’ here on my blog, but now that it’s appearing in the July issue of the Terror Tract e-zine (check the table of contents to see “Blue” listed there), I’ve returned my story as published here to ‘draft’ status.

My story is about a blue, gelatinous substance from outer space landing on a tree in a park not too far away from the home of the protagonist, who gets a splattering of the blue on his skin. Over time, the blue takes over more and more of his body.

Apart from my short story, the July e-zine also has stories from such writers as Jack Rollins and John Barackman, as well as Jim Merwin, Jay Seate, Alfred Gremsly, Isaac Cooper, Kelly Evans, Ryan Woods, Becky Narron, Terry Miller, Matt Scott, and Anthony D Redden. There’s also an interview with Stefan Lear.

Please go out and get a copy of the e-zine. If you like horror fiction, you’ll love Terror Tract! 🙂

Another Poem by Clelia Albano

My Facebook friend, poet Clelia Albano, whose other work I have written about, has recently written a poem inspired by the work of poet Stefan Markovski, whose work, Promised Land, can be found here (and which has also been raved about by Albano in the comments).

Here is the text (again, I’m putting it in italics to distinguish it from my own writing):

Inspired by Stefan Markovski

And the poet descends down
into the chthonic realm
to meet his
Eurydice – inspiration –
and as he finds the words by extracting them
from the magmatic earth
surrounded by shadows,
like a miner he breathes dust.
Chewed and kneaded with
his divine saliva,
Orpheus brings them back to light
after he had madly turned his
head back for looking at the source
of what he creates, and he
embeds them in his chant and caresses them
with his fingers as he would caress
his beloved whose lament “heu”
feeds his blood.

And now, for my analysis.

In her tribute to Markovski, she compares his search for poetic inspiration to Orpheus in his search to rescue his beloved Eurydice from the Underworld. Albano is imagining Orpheus’ lover to be his Muse, just as Markovski is, in turn, Albano’s male Muse.

The search for poetic inspiration is a painful one: it doesn’t just come to the writer as a fluke. The writer must work hard at his or her craft, and in the process of doing this work, then the ideas come. The Muse helps those who help themselves.

Apart from the pain Orpheus feels in his desperate yearning to get his Eurydice back–understood here as symbolic of the poet’s painful search to retrieve inspiration–we see in Albano’s poem a comparison of the poet to a miner: “he finds the words by extracting them/from the magmatic earth/surrounded by shadows,/like a miner he breathes dust.”

One “descends down/into the chthonic realm.” On first glance, the word down seems superfluous, but when one considers the additional meaning for down, that is, ‘sad,’ we can see its use as justified. Also, “chthonic” adds to the dark sense of dread of being in the Underworld (“magmatic earth/surrounded by shadows”), since searching for inspiration can be a kind of Hell for a poet.

There is a vivid sense of the unpleasantness of the endeavour to find inspiration in how Albano says “like a miner he breathes dust./Chewed and kneaded with his divine saliva.” The use of the word dust, by the way, is also noted in her review of Markovski’s book of poems (link above). In it, she says, “his poems are populated by angels, wings, the Moon and the Sun, rain, wind, dust, ashes, powder, war and peace.” (My emphasis) So we see here how she was inspired by his writing to the point of using his imagery in her own poem, using it to express the discomfort of extracting that very inspiration. (I love, by the way, the melodious assonance in “divine saliva.”)

The poet “brings…back to light” his (or her) sources of inspiration, though in his madness he looks back at his Muse, Eurydice, dooming her to return to Hell. The pain in never getting that coveted inspiration back is the cross the poet must always bear.

He caresses those pieces of inspiration as an expression of the love he feels for them. That caressing is meant to soothe the pain of his doomed love, whose heu “feeds his blood.” This Latin expression of lament is an allusion to Book IV of Virgil‘s Georgics (line 498), in which Eurydice tells Orpheus of how his mad looking back at her has doomed her, and their love.

I’m sure all writers out there (me included, of course) can relate to Albano’s painful search for the right words to express one’s inner feelings. The excess of pain that Markovski has felt in producing his fine poetry is something she has noted and appreciated…and fortunately for us, her readers, been inspired by.

Bellies

The bellies
of the fat cats
are as swollen as
their pride. They
need to die…t.

The stomachs
of us First World
citizens, yes, ours,
are similarly
bloated. We
suck our guts
in, but still it
shows. Obesity

is
not
a
pro-
blem
in
the
glo-
bal
sou-
th.

The
pou-
ched
bell-
ies
of
the
poor
are
emp-
ty
sacks
of
air.

They
must
be
fed.
Deaf
are
we
to
the
cries
of
the
hun-
gry.

We waste
food that
they could
eat. Our diet,
so tied to their
dying, must be
tightened.

Only
then
can
all
the
poor
be
freed
of the
tight
grip of
empire’s
might.

Their full
bellies means
the end of our
emptiness.

Blood

F
a
r

t
o
o

m
u
c
h

b
l
o
o
d

has been spilt
on the ground,

t
h
e

b
l
o
o
d

o
f

t
h
e

innocent,
blameless
civilians.

R
i
c
h

m
e
n

h
a
v
e

b
o
m
b
s

d
r
o
p
p
e
d

on cities
and houses.

O
n
e

d
a
y
,

t
h
e
y
‘
l
l

f
a
l
l

to the ground
where we are,

f
r
o
m

t
h
e
i
r

h
i
g
h

s
e
a
t
s

o
f

p
o
w
e
r

to the dirt
where we’re buried.

T
h
e
i
r

b
l
o
o
d

w
i
l
l

r
e
p
a
y

all the blood
that they’ve spilt.

T
h
e
i
r

l
a
s
t

b
l
o
o
d
,

r
e
d
e
e
m
i
n
g

that first blood
of ours,

will mean no more wounds,
the beginnings of peace.

‘O Heavenly Rain,’ a Poem by a Friend

Here’s a poem by another Facebook friend of mine, Amy Elizabeth Sisson Riberdy. (Here’s more of her poetry, if you like what you read below, Dear Reader.) Again, I’ll be putting the poem in italics to distinguish her writing from mine:

O dark grey heavens, give it your all
Open! – Release the iron floodgates
Of rushing rains and crashing thunders
Send those healing waters rushing down
To a parched and hungry world that thirsts
For the nourishing life only you
Can give down to him and me and them
And all who cry for the mercy of
Your rain

O shrouded heavens, cool the dry ground
With your pounding, seething cleansing rains
As we lift our pleading mouths to drink
Let the swords of angels tear and rend
The dark shrouds to free the cascading
Torrents of great black billowing clouds
That rise above our beseeching hands
We pray thee, O merciful heavens
Please let loose the soothing showers of
Your rain.

O merciful heavens, drench the dust
Of white hot desert sands and fill these
Mud – caked rivers to the very brim
With all that man desires to savour
Let me swim in your cooling blessings
Caressing your refreshing embrace
And be lost eternally down in
Swirling waters of endless oceans
Cleansed forever in the freedom of
Your rain

…and now, for my analysis.

The yearning for rain immediately made me think of King Lear in Act III, Scene ii, lines 1-9, then lines 14-24:

“Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow!
You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout
Till you have drench’d our steeples, drown’d the cocks!
You sulph’rous and thought-executing fires,
Vaunt-couriers to oak-cleaving thunderbolts,
Singe my white head! And thou, all-shaking thunder,
Strike flat the thick rotundity o’ th’ world!
Crack nature’s molds, all germens spill at once
That make ingrateful man!…”

Then,

“Rumble thy bellyful. Spit, fire; spout, rain.
Nor rain, wind, thunder, fire, are my daughters.
I tax not you, you elements, with unkindness;
I never gave you kingdom, call’d you children;
You owe me no subscription. Then let fall
Your horrible pleasure. Here I stand, your slave,
A poor, infirm, weak and despis’d old man;
But yet I call you servile ministers
That will with two pernicious daughters join
Your high-engender’d battles ‘gainst a head
So old and white as this. O, ho! ‘Tis foul!”

The next piece of classic writing that her poem made me think of was the Great Flood narrative in Genesis, a drowning of the Earth to wipe away all of sinful mankind and replace it with Noah’s righteous (or so they’d seem) family.

Now, the contrasts between these three literary examples of great rainfalls are themselves great. Amy is begging for rains that will restore life to the dried and dying earth. Lear is saying that the rain may be as cruel to him as it pleases. God floods the earth to cause death to all sinners.

Yet, even in these contrasts we can see points of dialectical comparison. Amy wants to “Send those healing waters rushing down/To a parched and hungry world that thirsts.” (thesis) Lear would be accepting of the cruelty of the storm (negation); for the very destructiveness of the Great Flood will rid the world of evil, purify it, and allow for new life in the end (sublation).

To enjoy “the mercy of/Your rain,” we must first accept the pain of a purge of all that is evil, “With your pounding, seething cleansing rains.” When “the swords of angels tear and rend,” we again see the juxtaposition of harshness and violence (“swords…tear and rend”) with sweetness (“angels”). We cannot have happiness without sadness.

Nobody likes going out in the rain and getting soaked, but we need rain to water our plants and give us food. So, in order to live, we must experience unpleasantness. As Robert Plant once sang, “upon us all a little rain must fall.”

Though God destroyed the world with rain, Amy calls up to the “merciful heavens” to “let loose the soothing showers of/Your rain.” Lear would have pour the “horrible pleasure” of the rain. In all three cases, one is grieved to one’s heart. Amy is grieved by the drought she sees all around her, be that a literal or metaphorical one. God is grieved and regretful of the sinful humanity He sees on the Earth. Lear is grieved by the wickedness of his two daughters, Goneril and Regan, and by the good daughter, Cordelia, to whom he was so wicked in disowning. All three would be relieved of their pain…through the powerful downpour of rain.

Amy would “swim in your cooling blessings/Caressing your refreshing embrace”…that is a really beautifully written line, such music in the words. She’d “be lost eternally down in/Swirling waters of endless oceans,” reminding me of my oft-used metaphor for Brahman, the title of a song I wrote years ago, and the title of my blog. She’d be “Cleansed forever in the freedom of/Your rain.”

“Your rain” is a refrain appearing three times. This trio can be symbolic of the dialectic I noted above (thesis/negation/sublation), the Trinity, the Hindu Trimurti, the triple-goddess, or any other conceivable group of three, for three is a magical, richly-symbolic number, representing beginning, middle, and end. Indeed, the three verses can be seen to symbolize three massive rainfalls, or even three huge raindrops, if you wish.

Rain’s wetness irritates, but it also cleanses.

Let it fall.