A dark snow descends, a plague sliding into
the shallows of my day, gathering in drifts
along the edges of my slender bones,
the arc of falling gray bending like a fractals
inward and inward
My heart seeks quiet, travels deep into a place
forsaken by sound, where the last sung song
was the dying breath of a long-sick child
The bleak silence, the fog frosting the windows,
the fires blazing behind my eyes, the ghostly
shape of a boy forming in the swirls of smoke,
these are the remnants of a lost life
The universe knows nothing about me, I have
left no mark, my hands empty, my mind
reeling into itself whenever I say my own name
My existence works like sand, sifting through
the waist of an hourglass
Tomorrow means turning the thing over,
letting the grains slip into a spreading mound
eroding as it rises, hours eroding into hours,
one moment identical to every other moment,
my life a nothingness forged by nothingness
Outside this house where I have sought refuge
from the howling of the blizzard, someone
has left a battered doll on the doorsteps,
two black cavities smashed into her face where
once there were eyes made of glass
and the color brown
It is another me I am holding, battered and crying,
me my own child, me stranded on an island of ice,
me the dark snow gathering on every side,
me rising like a prison, me alone
who must comfort me with my own suffering,
me who will bury this doll in a hole
deep enough for two abandoned souls,
me who is most worthy of being consumed
by this blizzard of nothingness, of me falling
upon me falling upon me without end