Winter Draws In

Winter draws in.
A searching, torchlight dusk
Sets the dark-bruised structures apart,
A collection of disparate and desperate memories
Cramped and trampled into every known ground
With only ivory-bright belly of sky
To uncover them.

The smothered echoes
Of mobiles and engines
And all turning things,
Ring out across the city
For context
For life to begin, again.

Wrapped up tightly
In the all-consuming cloak of urban malaise
Archetypal body shapes and guises,
Are impressionistically sketched out,
Of existence,
Surreal and shocking.

But every solitary outcast
Walking in the cold rush of the hour
Is a masterpiece in process,
A delicately taut string
To the benign bow of winterness
Drawing in.

Within this magical twilight,
Forms a moratorium on all masochistic mess.
Death commuted
Between A and B
Untethered from time and stress,
Feeling and moving freely
Towards the home of winter.

Only healing now, here
In splendid hibernation’s dawn.
Held in the beautiful freeze,
The transparent, potent pastiche