It could have been different

I remember snow falling

and a fleet of foxes

leaving soft trail in the new drifts

hot chocolate flavored whiskey

herb and venison stew simmering slow

Desperate Journalist playing in the den

parliaments and democracies worrying

about volcanoes and nuclear storms

a twinkle in the eye

bite down on the Bitcoin billionaire

I caressed the words you were forming

sanctity in the silence before

knickers and freshly laundered sheets

on the morning a crispness, cruel

a cramp in the muscles, except

in your mind

fever came quickly with the fallout days

underscored by semantics of reason

bright were the goodbyes in a Viking pyre sort-of-way

conspiracies and treason

flags of our palace tattered

dreaming a distant tomorrow

I felt I was falling backward

I of the small sorrows

you were crying but I couldn’t stop it

I was trying but you couldn’t stop it

we…

Pop goes your weasel

in mellifluous cloud

of unknown gasses

carotid arteries of the woe-begones

I can no longer think

with a hole in my head

Incontinent, as time

shits the slow minutes

that weep through the barrier

of ill intentions and seep out

like plasma onto the subsurface

of our minutiae

retrovirus of pandemic

spreading fingers inside a body

to enrapture and assimilate

for the survival of the whos and whats

and the gun-metal wants of

the wardog rabid malcontent

I have witnessed biting

his fleas in my fenced back yard

electric eyes don’t blink and never

shed tears on what they witness

staring fixed at all or none

conversion 2.0 is fear

massive convictions are fraught

in netting, pulled from the C’s

of negligence and commonality

through a fit to give what you get

voting downtown hard times

convolute the meanings

and instead homesteaders

and ranchers continue to…