I’ve held this feeling before–and even now–this deep mourning when all the world seems lost in this festive fantasy all around me. It often comes when death arrives on holiday mornings, when celebration lives on everywhere but your own home. Loss rarely comes just once, instead choosing to stretch out over weeks, maybe months. Thus, even if tragedy occurs long ago, it can stick with someone through all the seasonal joy and expected elation that comes on the calendar. This poem just tries to put that feeling into words.
a coldness
very particular yet expansive
a tree of ice rooted in dreams plagued
by sour memories bitter pangs
like a moist dew on an evergreen lawn
that crisp chill of wretched death sits coy
powerful in its ignorance and evil in its morbidity
it is this freeze
which festers in sidewalk cracks
which sits in cavernous forests
which soothes frigid crooks
my town is ravaged by this coldness
this abolition of community in favor
of worthless security a bond broken
by bitter winter bleeding on summers
once white dress now violet in the violent fusion
and even now we sit
tapping toes to and fro with time
dying daily doubt turned down for
frosts sour memory that rumbling of the spine
stitched into the city streets
etched into the sidewalk cracks
blood blushed on white coats once dry
the holiday season never ends,
not when the snow still reeks of corpses
