I’ve always loved
The brutal honesty
That comes with winter.
It is, finally, every part of
Creation laid bare.
The trees become black silhouettes
Against a grey sky,
The sky is granted permission
To release all of its fury,
And members of mankind
Are brought face to face
With one another
As they try to hide
From the cold winter winds.
Even in its cruelty,
Winter drives us together,
And that, in this world,
Is a kindness.

I can't help but wonder what you will remember of me.
That's every man's fate, isn't it?
To become a scrap of detail that snags or escapes a stranger's memory,
Stuck in a grate in the floor where it fluttered, discarded,
Or lodged in a permanent frame, dusted off every so often
to be a reference point
or to be a defining moment.
It isn't up to us how we are remembered -
- what is a rainbow to the blind but a refreshing mist on the skin?
And that's why we obsess: we have no control,
hard as we try, contour, conceal, and coordinate.
And that never stops us from trying.
But for a moment, consider this superpower that others will never have:
You can remember them.
You can't escape yourself, but you can remember them.
Will you remember them kindly? Will distaste be tattooed in your mind?
The things that are going to happen will happen.
And we can act according to how we want to be remembered.
But we cannot change it.
But our remembrance cannot be changed either.
It's a little spiteful optimism, isn't it?

“”Hope” is a thing with feathers...”
Only, I don’t think it is.
See, feathers mean it’s a flighty thing
And belie its true belligerence.
Hope may yet have feathers,
But forget not the claws.
Hope is a thing with brambles;
Hope has a tendency to stick in crops.
This little burr adheres to the underside,
Never noted unless poked.
It clings tightly in the smallest gap
And can’t be ignored once evoked.
Now, I grant you, Hope may seem rather rare,
But lay on your stomach at night; you’ll find that it’s there.

If you'll be the moon,
I will play the sea.
Wherever you go,
Love, call back to me.

I have found,
You can endure anything,
If you have to.

At first,
You think that you can’t make it until the next minute,
But,
Suddenly,
The next minute is upon you,
            then the next,
                     and the next.

At an agonizingly slow rate,
Those minutes will turn into years.

This is how you survive.

We are so quick to blame the familiar.
Once fault is laid,
then the matter may as well be settled,
and it becomes someone else’s responsibility
to atone for our faults.
After all, there is nothing so unfamiliar to a man
as his own self.