On a day when it rains so hard you can't do anything (poem/mood piece in progress)

I want to hear the whining of rusty fans and the grinding of a ship's hull reverberating through the factory. That's my idea of a holiday.

I need a peeling dancehall in the cordoned-off season, seabirds nesting in the flying buttresses. The salt in the air preserves nothing. It's like Doom Jazz.

I want the sleet to slip into bed. I need the world to be the room my head is. I want the shattered attic to look out on an overgrown garden and a sodden cardboard stage.

I hold the broken cistern and nineties porn fading on the walls, I want mere corrugation. I need to be the quietest applause in the audience. The middle sister, the stillborn mouse, the pirouetting spider-husk. I could stop all this now with a coffee or snack but I won't. I'm not emptiest yet. I'm just dusk.

How to cope wth depression

What I do when I'm feeling utter despair is, I look at it and assess how much of it is mere desperation. Sometimes desperation can make you feel like Michael Douglas in Falling Down, and feeling like Michael Douglas in Falling Down is slightly cool if not pleasurable. Then I look at how much of it is ennui. Ennui is quite cool in a Dorothy Parker / Jean-Paul Sartre kind of way. So maybe my depression isn't all bad. Then, when you look at ennui, some of it might be melancholy. Melancholy can be cool, like Acker Bilk. Maybe about 60% of that melancholy could be wistfulness, like a yearning for a beautiful Summer sunset with a girl you once loved, or playing in the fields as a child. Then you have successfully transferred your mental state into nostalgia.

This is a little like a CBT version of the bit in the Muppet show where Statler and Waldorf, the two miserable old hecklers in the balcony say 'Boo! That was rubbish!' 'Awful!' 'Actually, there was a bit of it that wasn't so bad..' 'Yeah, there were some parts of it that were quite good!' 'Yeah, actually I loved it!' 'Bravo!' 'Encore!'

And then I see a man with no limbs in a motorised wheelchair being brave, or a beautiful child about the age that mine would be now, and I burst into floods of fucking uncontrollable tears.