Words tremble and form on my lips.
In the middle of nowhere,
on an old, abandoned field’s
icy, quiet calm – I can
see those words as frosted air,
palpable, almost real.
Almost.
The memory of ecstasy
ripples vehemently in rifts,
saying, ‘don’t let go –
don’t let go of the moment,
the tenderness and the journey
that has begun –
don’t let go of the time invested
and the heart’s own life span,’ –
I clap my mitts together hard.
I need to hear another voice
in the heavy, thick dullness
of meaningless, inside this bitterly
cold wilderness – an expansion
of existence.
Inside this perfect ring of O,
caution and doubt is excluded
by the wintry tourniquet
and deep seated bleakness.
Within this rink of fire,
I have found a plan;
idly scraped into the dense snow’s
virgin white territory
are thoughts and decision making –
a bittersweet means to an end.
I exhale and words reverberate –
detached.
Let loose, they do their own thing.
I believe that trust is its own reward,
and love is a consequence
of that very airing –
so, I let them breathe.
My lips tremble from more words,
although I can’t hear them, they spill
and the cold lets them sit there.
Sat on the snow, memories
cosy up to them,
of when tears made me choke
and lies made me half blind –
now they both
thaw like a discarded
ice lolly bleeding into the impacted
prisms hidden in this pristine
foundation.
I rub my insulated woollen hand
over the small pond’s glass
to see a lifetime spent asking
why amid my mind’s sighs to half
answered questions and doubts,
and painful bouts of inertia.
I find a heavy rock, and listening
only to the whispers between
my thighs’ nylon energy,
I smash it into a face
in the ice –
all of those things are finally
released and surface through the shards
of their confinement –
roaming prisoners cut loose
to set me free,
to crawl out onto the debris.
Wading knee deep I try to remember
what was instilled in me;
I was taught to swim and love,
and trust in rewards,
I was loved and I am loved,
a consequence of not sinking –
swim freely.
The temperature plummets
within, and still knee deep, I am caught
in the ice of limbo
like a reluctant, unbaptised infant
who already knows its own mind.
Today, it is not as simple; revisited
once again, by dark clouds that come
to smother me with their words –
they take their place in the queue
in this time lapse of a snowy day
where whiter clouds come and go,
but like my words they are seldom
realised, and so I have to withdraw
into a quiet blackness – the Narnia sheen
of glistening reason is too bright,
too stark, too vivid when shouts scream
from it.
The pool of unhurried water is a starkly
black dilation –
of a welcoming eye – the pupil inside
this giant O.
I fall into its gaze, and like yours
it swallows me up.
