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