Pale faces and even whiter smiles,
Big sweaters, flannels and the way your boots sounded.
Tell me you love me,
I'm forgetting your voice.
Once more darling,
You're my drug of choice.
Catch the snowflakes on your eyelashes,
Can I make a wish upon your lips?
Maybe you'll stay the night this time,
One, two, three strokes on my hip.
Pretend you care,
Just one more night.
Winter love,
Melts just as fast,
Even with your heart of ice.

My wife, a psychiatrist, sleeps
through my reading and writing in bed,
the half-whispered lines,
manuscripts piled between us,

but in the deep part of night
when her beeper sounds
she bolts awake to return the page
of a patient afraid he'll **** himself.

She sits in her robe in the kitchen,
listening to the anguished voice
on the phone. She becomes
the vessel that contains his fear,

someone he can trust to tell
things I would tell to a poem.

You thought I was that type:
That you could forget me,
And that I'd plead and weep
And throw myself under the hooves of a bay mare,

Or that I'd ask the sorcerers
For some magic potion made from roots and send you a terrible gift:
My precious perfumed handkerchief.

**** you! I will not grant your cursed soul
Vicarious tears or a single glance.

And I swear to you by the garden of the angels,
I swear by the miracle-working icon,
And by the fire and smoke of our nights:
I will never come back to you.

Don't tell me what the weather will be,
I want to experience life myself. I need
that unknowable moment
when you step outside and
it hits you like a train.

Let's stop talking about the snow
and start rolling in it.

I want to know even less
about the future. I crave
shock and awe and
jaw-dropping reality.
I don't want to see the sun on the television.
I want it to slap me in the face
in person.

I don't care about the predicted
animated snowflake.
Let it surprise me.
Seeing is not believing,
I need to feel it.
I want to taste that snowflake
so raw, so real, so humanely cold
that it will be grateful
it landed
on my skin.

You are a beacon in the dark,
with a red ember, at your fingertips.
Take another drag of your smoky romance,
and let it hang, tinged with red, at the edge of your lips.
I'd come with you anyways, just with the promise of company
through the night's solemn hours.
Would you give a name, and cease to be,
a spectre of the dark just long enough, for me to see,
the colour of your eyes?
Or will you fade behind that red beacon
and become the smoke you breathe.
So long as you wait, for the sun to wake
to leave, and I know you won't come back.
At least, not until
the quiet dark settles again.

Light another, we've got hours til morning.

I'm dead tired and sobbing on my bed again.
They'll blame it on the drugs,
They'll blame it on the parties,
They'll blame it on themselves,
The truth is I've dropped the ball again.
Lost myself amongst the forest that is my thoughts,
                                                                                        And the birds in the trees are mocking me because they ate the bread crumbs, the bread crumbs that were my way out. You would think it hard to get lost in a forest of saplings,
                                     Child trees just as I, somehow still growing despite mental states that no one will ever know about. Either way now I'm stuck, a gun in one hand and a knife in the other,
                                                                                                                                                    You'll ask me what they are for and I'll reply with nothing but a shrug and a set of words that will mean nothing to you and everything to me. You'll continue to voice concern, somehow appearing amidst the trees, but you could never stay for long, eventually evaporating into the mist you were made from, leaving me alone in the jumbled forest of waist-high trees.
                                                                            They're all mumbling short confused sentences all vying for air and sunshine, all hoping to be complete thoughts capable of cognition, but they are being choked, stepped and trodden on, leaving them dazed and confused, roots writhing in the ground, and I could never tell what gargantuan thing lurked amongst the saplings in my chest, but it ripped and tore at everything it touched. It's a poison that bit into my veins and sedated my muscles.
                                                                                                                                           It seeped into my everything somehow hiding behind a mask of cognitive thought, ever beyond the peripherals of sight.    
It holds me captive, whispering lewd suggestions and anxiety filled words into my ear,
                                                                                                                                                  It tells me I dropped the ball, and it caught it. Hands on my shoulders it'll bite my neck over and over again.
Could you ever see it? The demon tree, wrapped like a vine around my neck, thorns digging into soft flesh and wrapped, wrapped just tight enough to clip the words in my throat.
Could you ever hear it? Replace my words with it's own, of course not, you'll only ever hear the two words most often used as a lie, but that's fine, because I'm fine even though its taken control of the left hand, the one with the gun and it tries, tries so hard to pull the trigger, but it can't, not yet, because I have a knife at it's throat and it doesn't know that the knife is dull and can't cut anything but myself. So I stand stranded, caught feeling small and insignificant, unable to tell the difference in the mirror between myself and the demons.
                                                        The trees are dying and so am I. Laying in my bed, dead tired and sobbing.
If I died now,
They'd blame it on the drugs,
They'd blame it on the parties,
They'd blame it on themselves.
They'd never blame me.
So if you are reading this
and are fond of trees
and it's not too late
take the knife from my throat
and just promise, you won't turn into mist.