Winter came early last year, cleansing people
of people
as soon as she could.
She was late this year, finally
icy winds have settled in
but she spent so long sitting and clinging
to summer's warm hands.
The waiting made my head spin, summer's other
crooning lovers stayed standing
far too long, as I prayed for sterile snows to snap
the swooning songs in half
and hollow them out for spring
so that I, perhaps, could join in.

Sleepy sickly summer thronged thickly around me
dragging hazily onwards
setting nothing forwards but my
happy heart rate,
full to bloating with hapless hope
— infatuated and ill with hope —
that I too would ripen on orchard walks
into a round and inviting apple tree
instead of oozing sap sickly, overzealously setting
roots in the wrong soil,
while winter, she let me toil on, clutching at s'mores with clammy summer hands, sick with excitement and marshmallows,
sick with the image of his face
when, like a grave,
he lay under me
and she refused to freeze the ground beneath
as though I actually I stood a chance.

But nothing grew and nothing changed
except my un-
happy heart rate.
The drought left me
without a hope in the world that I too, could learn how to play,
because he hid the rules from me
and like a schoolboy singing nursery rhymes relentlessly
he teased me senseless, then seized my heart for all to see
he adored me, then ignored me
and I clawed for disease, no matter the reach
I saw myself as he saw me

My rosy ballooning cheeks
were on the verge
of prematurely bursting and fading away to the apathy
of oxygen-starved grey skin;
rebirth still impossible with every sweltering day
that I got locked in.

I fell into a grave
sleep, and heard him say,
in a dream, in all his gleam,
'We were too sick for love, either way'
But now, I am awake,
Winter woke me, came to her senses and washed summer away
she said, ‘you can make this your day,
the air is cold and you are golden,
don’t be satisfied with all this grey’,
and I knew then,
that he had nothing to do with summer,
some are just too sick to stay.