This piece was originally published on the Sudden Denouement Literary Collective‘s WordPress page. I cannot encourage you strongly enough to visit this page and read some of the brilliant work written by this talented group of writers and visionaries. I am honored to have a place there.
Winter is starting
To settle into my bones
Making itself at home
The cold steals silent,
Stealthy under doorways and seeps
Through the small cracks in my armor
Looking for firm purchase
Conspiring to steal my warmth
Chilling my nose, my toes
My fingertips
The flat gray December skies
Speak of future snow
Will it be a flurry
Or a blizzard, I wonder?
The days grow short
The nights grow long
And as sleep is often as evasive
As a child playing hide and seek with me
In a many roomed Victorian house
Full of small hidey-holes
This darkness can feel endless
Unrelenting
I worry that winter’s frost
Is starting to form
Over the delicate tissue
Of my heart
Making my blood slow and sluggish
That it will crystalize on my soul
Encasing me, trapping me
Under a clear sheet of ice
Thick, hard, muffling my voice
I fight to resist this
Encroaching winter
This mournful twilight
But I am isolated
In this icy landscape
Full of skeletal trees
Frozen puddles surrounded
By hard mud that crunches
Under my frozen feet
I feel transparent
Thin somehow
Have I become a ghost?
I seek a lantern in the darkness
Or a bright red cardinal
To break up this
Bleak, white tundra
