waking up to a sallow gray dawn, a morning
preceding the message of someone missing —
then of a body abandoned by self and violent hands —
and time turns into a series of tear-filled prayers
made in the snow, reminding me how
we used to make temples out of sugar cubes
(faith is so sweet but it crumbles so easily).
We groom the dead and lay them in
beds of white as if we can make death into
something beautiful — something holy —
something less fucked up than
a violent lesson in impermanence.
Icicles drip venom onto pavement,
pearls of ice and snow waste away into sunshine —
spring may have come to consume the world but
I’m still stuck in winter —
lost in nightmares of frozen stars and
starless eyes and a winter-paralyzed body
turning into marble on a moonlit river that
never melts and never flows, forgetting
that the trees have bloomed around it and
the niveous shadowland has vanished
into sick-sweet blossoms and shrill bird songs.
We drift down time

…clutching at straws.