Until the Rain Decides What Counts by Wayne Martin Mellinger, Ph.D.

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UNTIL THE RAIN DECIDES WHAT COUNTS



I. Conditional Recognition

They see you only when you resemble
someone they already know how to help.

Recognition is a flickering porch light—
on when you knock,
dark again before you reach the gate.

A man exists
as long as someone keeps saying his name
into a phone that might not pick up.

II. The Burden of Legibility

Before you may receive bread,
you must explain your hunger
in a language hunger makes impossible to speak.

He carries his life
in a torn envelope of documents—
proof folded into proof—
until the rain decides what counts.

The drowning man,
asked to describe the water.

III. Documentary Sorting

You are not turned away.
Your paperwork is.

A life passes through a desk
and comes out thinner.

Boxes are checked.
The folder closes.
Somewhere inside it,
a person waits.

IV. Documentary Sedimentation

The first refusal becomes the reason for the second.
The second, for the third.

Each encounter leaves a trace—
ink drying into fact—
until stone is laid on stone
and the weight is called fate.

They did not bury him.
They filed him.

V. Temporal Mismatch

The system moves in fiscal years.
The body keeps time like a wound—
urgent, irregular, breaking open at night.

The courthouse clock ticks forward.

By the time the bed opens,
the need has changed its shape—
or stopped needing altogether.

VI. Administrative Death

The case is closed.
This is not a metaphor.

The file goes quiet.
The phone stops ringing.

He exists still—
on the sidewalk, in the cold—
but nowhere that counts.

The record has already
held his funeral.



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