Somewhere,
drones are dropping mortars on top of sleeping men. All the while the trusted corrupt are telling their truths to people grabbing what's left. Snow storms and summer droughts are no longer an event. While the world is changing in ways we already predicted, we choose to focus on why we're not the bad guys in this story. All of this, reinforced by the woke who are telling me nothing really matters anymore.

But right here,
I'm sitting alone on a winter night. I look across the street to watch a scruffy tabby knock over a dusty jar left on someone's window sill. Glass shatters across the lawn held tight by a blanket of untouched snow. I watch the shards cast miniature shadows, glistening as the porch light turns on. It was only for a moment, though, before I continue my attempt at writing about the beautiful things in life. Attempting - because these days it's difficult; because it matters. It matters to me oh so much.

Until the Spring Ball

the farms in the bog form an --


archipelago.

~
alone and an imposter,
deep in syndrome.

she absorbs the frost of seasonal ghosts
and hopeless feelings
of death and darkness.

she only shows one side of her every time.
she calls a random number
from a bar in the middle of the night,
seeking to confess
or find solace in the voice of a stranger.

but any stranger might just happen to be
a lie detector.

still she lays bare all the duplicity
and fragmentation of self:

prescription bottles with two different names,
elaborate façades in Los Angeles
and in New York,
so complicated she creates
something she calls the lie box.

inside her purse there's a collection
of file cards. "I tell so many lies," she says.
"I have to write them down and keep them
in a box so I can keep them straight."

alone she waits for either
sweet apricity or identikit:
each a memento of her faces.
~

dark hair, darker nights
the winter solstice draws us
together again

Places to defer:
To a salty justice
Soap and a question worth
Please be my ought, a common request with a shrill vice?

Salt seems to be my only hope...
Stoic rewards and harrowing few's, of callousness
Aside, I see the providence of stillness, take root
With a smile and a sharing behalf, I wonder if I bless...?

Stong winds may disapprove...
Long looks at no-where's imagination...
Standing well in front, savagery in back with no love...
And the anarchy of that smile, anxious and doting on silent...

Nightmares, with a reaching lead of simplicity
A lip of service and dissuasion, set too high
For a requited moment, to tell the wishes we imply, inherently
Have the yearning before a seldom seen, angel understands cry...

Given the time, given the lucid rhyme
Of patience and its virtue, your remembering
Of a long sated and twisted form to compare, the youth of time?
Has a voice struck with means, meager enough to swear we...

Shoulder
A rising fortune of senses alive, set to aches and plains
Of worlds redeemed, by a wish we made, with a meant nerve
Will you marry me, is even a voice to martyr beyond the call of the rains...?

How horrible and happy life is all together
How privileged you are to remember both together
A little bit of patience, barely spanning a meter
To sustain a tiny candle light in the heart of winter
Be still little heart
The summer is almost here
Then the reaping will start
Just as the dew reappears...

My heart is spring in January. I can feel it in my bones when it's about to rain. The smell, the unearthing of everything we buried. It's the way in grief too.

Anniversaries are the seasons we never can quite escape. Pulling us back into the tundra & frozen in time. We revisit the moments as if they never quite left us.

I swear each year the midwesterners must reckon the seasons changing yet again, but each winter all still feels the same to them....

Like it was the very first time.

Winter had arrived
overnight, and

we had slept soundly through it, the
snow smothering

any sounds that dared
try to escape.

The morning arrived clear and sunny
and cold.

I was washing the dishes in that
old kitchen sink of ours when I noticed them—

footprints through the snow in our backyard—I couldn’t
say how many sets there were—

starting at the back fence and
proceeding directly

to our kitchen window. You
told me that you were going to head outside

to shovel the walk, but I told you
that I would take care of it, and I put on

my boots but no jacket, and I walked
out the back door, shovel held tightly

in hand. The tracks traced
the full perimeter of our house—

they appeared to be searching
for something—and they stopped

right outside of her
bedroom window—I couldn’t say

how many sets there were, or how long
they’d stood there while she slept.

I don’t know what
compelled me, but I turned the shovel

over, hurriedly using its edge to scrape
away the footprints there beneath the

window, the grass beneath them still
green and struggling to breathe.

And when I came back inside
you asked me

what I was up to out there, and I told you
that it was too cold

to shovel, that we should put on
another *** of coffee,

that we should stay inside
and not face the day,

and let the children
keep sleeping.