Cold brain, cold thoughts

In the winter, all our decisions seem to revolve around the cold–what we wear, how we travel, whether we even decide to leave our houses. The cold permeates everything. Even my writing.

 

Rational Thought

What if the cold somehow

wraps itself

around my eyeballs

and they turn to slush

all the proteins congealing, not quite solid

behind a thin membrane

that would barely pucker–ts–

if you applied gentle pressure,

and I can’t see anymore, not even with my glasses?

 

Glasses are for people with

room-temperature eyeballs

that bounce back like grapes

under gentle pressure.

People who think too much,

probably,

about the temperature of their eyeballs

and have no trouble

imagining them frozen.

Forward motion

My Blood Wrote This Poem

Blood is a juxtaposition.

It propels us to life, racing

through angel-hair veins, anxious

and wind-pressed.

Coursing, it clings, cell-to-cell

incubating heat like asphalt. Blood never recedes–

it pours, warm and slick,

a burst of molten mineral encroaching

over scarred land.

Finally it freezes into resolute clusters,

drained of luster, ashen

and earthy.

Blood always lives

until the last.

The God of New

“Remember not the former things, nor consider the things of old. Behold, I am doing a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it? I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert.” –Isaiah 43:18-19

The Earth’s Baptism

That morning the rain started lightly,

coalescing in the pre-dawn, murmuring

where wind once adorned air;

slowly it coiled like a river snake,

soft and intangible.

The rain gathered itself among crackling reeds,

bent low to smell, to taste unseasoned earth

that would become the tomb of a beloved child.

The rain wrapped around and around,

a tear-woven shroud,

tenderly, to conceal what had already died

and begun to decay in the still darkness.

Unraveling in grief,

it wept for its now-muffled loss,

and did not breathe for forty days

until at last the rain gasped,

surprised by light that reached inside the tomb

and showed walls untouched by sorrow.

Hope tempered despair

and the rain changed then,

never again to consume all.