Cool and white the snow falls steady behind the glass turning the brownstone buildings white and smothering the sidewalks and its chill reaches out in frigid embrace and steals the heat from the blankets she’s wrapped herself in. The heater that runs along the wall’s trim in her apartment fights with a dull hum to keep her warm as the crystalline flakes throw themselves against the window to bring the cold into her bedroom and in defeat melt into streaming tears to match her own. In her ears the acoustic pulses like a choked and rhythmic sob and the song is sad and she is sad and looking to the sky the snow comes ceaselessly and without tempo and coats all evenly and it makes her sad too but where the singer’s voice lends understanding to misery and the instruments bleed with her heart the winter does not love her and would see her covered uniformly with the world and she thought that if she were to be sad she wished she could follow the songbirds south and be sad somewhere warm and far away and hear their mournful trills instead of the static buzz of her headphones and as she remained here with the numerous, nameless leaves that died in autumn and now lie buried in a white grave. Bracing against the chill, she sits up and wipes her eyes and starts another day.

Fiery and harsh

light on my lips

Drunken and drowning

from the first few sips

Nights full of love

Bring mornings of pain

For my red bleeding heart

And my soft muddled brain

Weeks and months pass

Without missing a drop

Suffering each second

If I tried to stop

Emboldened and brash

I drive it away

Only to plead

And beg her to stay

It pounds in my chest

The hurt doesn’t end

The wound stays open

Unable to mend

Blue chips and meetings

Are no kind of cure

Sobriety is nothing

If can’t have her

So I sit in my stupor

The bright world grows black

Numb and alone

Until she comes back

Rail cars pulled along the tracks by the roaring coal engine that fills the endless blue sky black with smog like squid’s ink in the light shallows as the train rattles across the silent plains. Crossed endlessly by track and post and wire the West falls quiet and becomes loud again as the yells from horseback and the shuffle of bison each halt under the fire of rifles and the whistle of steam as rail begets the plough and the plough more rail in a headlong conquest for the sea and reaching the rocky shores of the Pacific we turn back to the cool Eastern coast and the red-soaked agrarian dream and weep in our knowledge of finite gains and infinite cruelty and mourn the ignorance of an empty world.

Uniform choir singing

Monochromatic upbringing

Old world values

Small worldview

Boys shot in the streets

Because they don’t look like you

Her soft eyes cut me

Standing there all perceptions of imperfections and predisposed notions of what this world is to me are scorched away in the warm inferno glow of her corona.

Thin brown hair rippling like low tide

Flawless in her sundress as she spins in the daylight and laughs away my somber darkness and dares the stars to burn brighter.

Gentle fingers moving lightly through the air

Fearing that my damaged touch will make them rough and that my wounds will become her scars and the pure light that she radiates will be eclipsed and her white snow will be stained red.

But she has cuts of her own

She smiles as she bleeds and soothes my scrapes and shows me that if life is the razor then love is the tourniquet and that the collective bloodletting of humanity pours from its common cut and this

That we two, we too, we all bleed the same.