December Snow

There was a time in ignorance

Or just once on a Tuesday, I guess

When I believed this wasn’t so empty and that it all made sense.

When all the echoes of heaven

And all life’s sad searing glare

Could never strike down the stiff spine kite that fluttered through the air.

Where rainfall was always beautiful

Though it ruined flight paper art

With the promise that all was forgiven by the most pointless northern star.

I walked outside through the darkness

And found direction by the crunch of dead grass

That passed in the presence of eternity where, our heartbeats weren’t born in distress.

It sounds like a perplexing falsehood

The sort of nothing that matters forever until

The things that we squint at in darkness of night become all that our lives never will.

They’re hailstones on the stained glass windows

A farm frost that kills life in the earth

The failure of all that they still should have been, just as camels can die in the desert.

If you close your blind eyes, you will still mostly see

The map that lies vacant and a paintbrush stained red

With the marks that tick boxes to who we thought we would be-

                                                          Until we fell from the cliff face instead.

It’s the eternal truth, that inevitable case

The lying, the sadness that spreads

With the infinite promise of lives never left-

                                             That you were always just a voice in my head.

The bonds grow like Antarctica’s snowcaps

They float like a solid gold anchor

Beyond the passage of time as reality was, where even shadows can find more to savor.

I once chased ghosts there through veins of kingdom stone

Down the atrophied chasms of life never known

And so great my need to feel I cared, for these cold dead things that were not there.

Then at last the silence has fallen

The tune that was always foretold

Left here to sit as the temperature drops in a home to be sold and resold.

And there I will wonder through avalanche thoughts

About all this pointless sadness and life’s inevitable ash

Until each and every memory falls and shatters just like glass.

Because all of them are fleeing now

And their ship is at the pier

And all of them are dancing to a song I cannot hear.

And even though I’m listening

And even though I’m deaf

I hear my own words whispering in the emptiness they’ve left:

“Whatever happened to the friends I used to have

The people I used to know?

All these things are dying now in this cold December snow.”