Not The Fall

The rain lands muted on tired cobbled stone
Repenting the sky
Doomed by its own mass
To plummet helplessly to the pavement below
“it isn’t the fall”, they tell me
“it’s the sudden stop that kills you”
And somehow I see myself as a raindrop
A tiny ball
Falling
With my stomach in knots
And my heart in my throat
But it isn’t the fall that hurts
It’s the sudden stop
The cobbled stone
Crashing head first into reality
Finding that the long descent is nothing
It’s the hard, hard world
Rising to meet me
That hurt the most
And falling might be
The best feeling of all
Except for the firm
Stone ignorance
Of an unsympathetically dry
Sidewalk

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