These are the words and the actuality
that in conjunction,
drive mothers of young children
to depression and distraction

Poets to look inwards yet once more,
for sources of olden inspiration,
finding only
been there, done that

Warmongers to chop lick lips
in eager anticipation of
past and future smokey glories,
gun batteries sparking and
other men's children dying

Overcast and cast out is loveliness,
only words of ancient, somber lineage,
populate, pursue and expectorate,
sunny notions and love poetry none,
dried up, to fallen leave piles dispatched

For on this day of rest, the foggy sky
grants no permission slips to draft
smiley faces and upbeat tempos,
comforts foods perhaps, but nary a
comfort word to make us cheery

Enslaved to nature this day too,
my exteriors reflect inward and my
mirror'd observatory of starry images
no longer available on any
of my two thousand TV channels

I have checked each one in a
be-quiet-you're-too-noisy dismay groaning,
as well as my ordinary, toujours,
quiet desperation

The sun tantrum tantalizes for I see
it's bodacious attacks repelled
by cloud banks rich with deposits of gloom

Slip into a mystery, an old novella
of Stephen Kings, an homage to the
drama of the four seasons, but this old friend
is elementary ancient, for its tales
are deep sad, writ upon weary worn pages
and tho apropos, grant no comfort

The sailors all to bed have gone,
plowing pillows instead of waves

The squirrels and other homeowners,
in view of the absence human,
are cheek to chop, jowls acorn full,
doing "Storage Wars" of winter prep,
in HD, in broad daylight arrogance,
mocking the summer man, adding their
sauciness to his moody blues
meal of melancholia

Am I such a creature of nature,
that I am captive no matter
what the sky color be,
is there a moody madness the
psychiatrists have labelled
that best describes a nature slave
most unnaturally?

I repair to the couch and chips,
reruns to pretend distraction and
poetry to record my inaction

The weather lady, a fresh faced blonde,
smiles white and exclaims that
the work week commencing tomorrow
all sunny all unseasonable warm,
and my groans so loud,
I am banished to parts bedroom foreign,
where I am ordered to write
perfunctory odes to gloom,
in silenced doom

In the languid flow of eight in the morning
she scurries beneath the lethargic settling
of the chill of great October
Learning much
teaching everything
and saying nothing
she hasn't heard before
The dull encroachment of winter
pulls our eyes down
like the flowers come to wilt
under the heavy frosts
In summer!
Summer!
We were alive
and now it is a fight to move our legs
oh we of the winter mountains
and sweaters drawn tight around ourselves
awaiting the spring again with baited breath
The savage runners
beneath the snow
waiting with painted faces
behind classroom walls
spears of longing
for longer days
and Chopin plunking desperately
on a piano played two hundred years ago.
I am a child of Saturn,
of death and the winter months
but so too am I a keeper of this earth
freezing over like the stones in the ground
and begging for some warmth to touch me
This thaw cannot come soon enough,
for i fear that we shall all die alone in the snow
with hardly the energy to punch through the ice
to see the sun again.

Please
don't
break
my heart
even
if
it's
already yours.