Winter daze

On this eve of the eve of the new year, the end of the month, the end of the year, still the beginning of the season, I thought it was due time for a post.

I feel my shoulders 

hunch my spine over, 

protecting my heart 
from the cold.

I could really trace my bouts of seasonal inspiration/depression through old poems... the winter is wonderous in that way - inspiring and deadening and beautiful and hollow all the same.

For example -

2005:

Untitled

Under the covered bridge

secrets hang on the sucked-candy cane ends

of weeping icicles,

until now unheard; they drip 
precariously close to the edge

and then fall, shattering 
the eyes of an unsuspecting meanderer.

Without my glasses, blurred 
objects on the roadway forget themselves to me,

but my fleeting shape was never a part 
of their falling-rock reality, anyway.

Rough pines and slender birches bend

to hear the whispers of the mountain;

they stretch in vain to hide

the arrogance in their own indigo shadows.

2008:

(not) Surviving winter

In the second of a sob’s hitch

passion dies and all that

remains

is an open carcass

left to lie in its own

sucked marrow

stillness.

2010:

Northeast Corridor

I am wounded and whelmed –

can you be a mechanic and an artist

(these bodies break so easily) –

when the parts fail are we doomed or destined?

I M whenever U R

ready, for The F

                            all.

Listening to Dylan on the train is a religious experience

like Christmas lights

down the Northeast Corridor.

Grass returns where suburbia grows

out of industrial waste; West Philadelphia

screams through graffiti tenements and doghouse drainpipe dreams

of the backyard beyond

“Trenton Mak s T e World T kes”

and I am here again,

in the effervescence of reality,

counting on numerology reports to forecast a tomorrow that bleeds

through the pages of the journal I always mean to keep.

The puncture wounds of last night still throb

and bobbing in the rising sea tide are all of the small inconsistencies

of living and dying

to live. I am fearful of the time

when I call out a name in the night

and it isn’t yours.

In our houses of (non)silence

we all sleep deep,

breathing circa 1985 rhythms

that mingle with the frost-heave

static

and with the faucet drip sputter

that is the steady base

of night’s symphony, cacophony,

rhythms that perspire and conspire

to be trickled down with the wet beads of our past.

Tomorrow is

a full moon, blue moon

eve of a new year.

This winter? So it goes, that same ebb and flow. All things are stripped bare, exposing their ugly, dirty side streets and their beautiful, rosy cheeks. Right now this is what I think - love is a black and white dog running through the snow and between black and white birches, ears flapping back and a smile on his face just for me.