Snow, once wind-packed and
Crackling with a layer of ice,
Turned soft and wet under foot,

Like a rigid, schedule-driven life
Softened by a glimpse of mortality.

Like a hard impersonal heart
Warmed by the touch of a hand.

Like a cacophony of public chatter
Melted by the sound of a friend's "Hello."

Fresh weather will bring new snow,
And plummeting temperatures freeze the landscape solid again,
But these other things leave a glow that continues
After the moment has passed.

Time passing -
Is not the tick, tick, tick, of the movies.
It is a barely audible, high-pitched ringing in your ears.
It is the low thrum of a distant compressor somewhere.
It is the sound of the long shadows brushing against the wall.

Time passing -
It is the fabric rustle of changing your position in a chair.
A cat padding along the oak floorboards of the hallway.
An electric cube powering a computer.
The sizzle of speakers turned on with nothing playing.

Time passing -
I hear it from a silent telephone,
From the idle doorknob and hinges.
From wooden steps leading to my front door.

Time passing -
It is all of this,
And nothing.
So much nothing.

Stone cold, the blackening sky, stole our fields of flowers
They came like a silent flood over our continents
To block our sun and steal our humanity.

The ships were silent, and filled the skies.
Then down their marching hoards descended
Overwhelmed our puny technology, rendering us as apes.

Under their shadows our world went neolithic
They rendered all that was electrical or light to junk
We were left as scurrying ***** things among the soil.

Vastly reduced, our very memories were threatened
Forgetting how once we ruled our own planet
They plucked up our people like we once picked flowers.

When they came for me I was a child
The elders still telling me of the times I never knew
I had to learn their ways as I learned our own.

One day all our careful plans came together
And I sat hidden deep within their ship,
The thing so long pursued was found

Within that place, their robot brain
Where I could redefine their enemy as themselves
Then quick to a transport and back to my people.

Shortly then with a single bullet
We sparked their hostility sensors
The dark metal clouds burst soon with sun-like flame

We will never know the all that they knew,
Though we pick still among the mechanized ruins
And try to discover "from where" and "why."

More powerful than all our smartest elders
Covering the world with their dark mechanized oppression
But brought to an end by hands of a boy.

Many years now, since we brought them down
The hulking hulls worked now into barns and homes.
And once again we learn to talk across the oceans.

It wasn't long after the flames had ended
When in the fields the sun again warmed the soil
And fields of flowers there began to bloom.

There among the lushly verdant
Mosses damp and darkest green
Enchanted by a single word and
They call to life the darkness queen.

She slept with one dark resolution
Born of ages long forgot
Sworn to find her retribution
For what his villainy had wrought.

Sorcery built his path immortal
Claimed her castle of the North
Centuries five bring forth a portal
The key? One word to call her forth.

In an old, forgotten oak chest
A parchment found, it told the tale
Three women struck out on the quest
Resisting rain and blowing gale.

Gathered round the glade of green
At time foretold by old quatrain
They prepared to raise the queen
One word to resurrect her reign.

Rising now from forest floor
From deep within the ancient henge
Brought forth she flies to wage her war
Raised-up by one brief word: "Revenge"

Five forlorn fugitives stood tall
Five warnings to all who approach
Heavy bows move with foreboding in the wind
Chained to the wall of the ever-dark wood.

Needles brush needles,
Their tips like razor claws
Needles against bark,
Coarse and the colour of old blood.

They gaze across a soft blonde prairie
And the elders tell the tale.
"Avert your eyes, do not look upon the fugitives."
"Past those five, none return."
"Better to stay on the plains and live."

Five tired, twisted sentinels mark the boundary
A dark forest wraps around the low black mountain.
In our fathers' fathers' days, they say,
Pursued by horsemen they made it to the forest-edge
Five murderers, fugitives from the people.
Five went in, and none came out.

Their backs were seen immersing into a green wall
Their tracks ended at thick beds of needles
The horses would go no further.
The screams and howls were heard through the night.

Five fugitives went into the forest.
The next day, five tall, ageless trees
That were not there before.
They stand, and watch, and remind the people
You can run,
You can hide in the grasses.
But the forest wields a dark justice.

Coastal mist and mountains blue as ache –
As ice crystals encase his heart
Shadows begin to flood the valleys below.
With shallow breaths he lays embraced by snows
Upon a glacial bed – its covers will enrobe him for millennia.

The merciful numbness comes with the fading of the day
Finally bringing heavy, failing eyes
And the mists rise further up the slopes
To meet the gathering cloud.

Rendered helpless by the thinned air
He pushed himself beyond the boundary of the human world
Seeking rebirth in a Norse Asgard,
To find instead an icy tomb.  

At the end all is blue and white and grey
To sleep, is to embrace the mountain.
He becomes another protrusion between ice-encrusted peaks
A mystery for another time, waiting amid the snow.

At the door again,
It begins as a quiet scratching
And then a thick, abrasive sliding-down
Like a heaviness upon the frame.
Then a barely perceived close-breathing
That seems to creep like dull lantern-light
Under the door,
And around the frame,
And through the keyhole.

And there is no talisman to protect him.
No bust of pallas above the door
He is no metamorphosing cockroach
Able to **** the gaps
With oily-black chitin feelers.

The darkness brings no tools but fear
Thick and impenetrable as the night
The ancient lizard-brain takes over
And leaves him waiting for the first rays
That will pierce the window like lances
And dissolve the oppressive world
That leans so heavy against his door.