Falling (1999)

Winter's snow falls ceaselessly
white until it touches the ground,
A beauty, for all its cold strength,
A display of nature and diversity
Watched by many within walled homes.
But the one lying in the alley
Being slowly covered by the cold
Only knows that he's warming up now
The beauty of the ice on trees doesn't move him
But sleep is beautiful
As it the rest it brings.

Winter (2000/2001)

Winter comes to the city as I walk,
Cold air knifing into me like blades.
The numbing kills my nerves,
Quiet fills me, purity flooding into me.

I bury myself in snow trying to forget,
Shivering behind the walls I build;
Willing myself to feel nothing, be nothing.
But I still am something,
Someone wandering in the night
Alone.

Walking (2000/2001)

Walking through the winter, engulfed in killing beauty,
I pause to think, thoughts coming to me slowly
Like sleet falling down, laden with the promise of more to come.
I think of despair, of the purity that is snow
Stained by touching the ground, turning yellow and brown.
Or even just meeting our impure air as it falls,
The dandruff of a god.
It numbs me within and without, leaving a ghost of memory behind
Like air expelled out into the cold.
It falls, white flakes covering the stains of old snow,
An optimism that only feeds my quiet despair:
Does it not know we'll kill it?
I watch it fall, and wonder why I care.

Scapes (2001)

Flickering visions dance past clouded by grime,
Smeared windows to the outside.
Lights flash by -- sudden glimpses of colour --
Signs blur past and are lost.
People trudge through slimy snow,
As quickly seen as forgotten.

Echoes of voices,
People huddle in forlorn clumps.
A few dare to whisper into the silences.

Signs gleam fluorescent above your head
Offering help for pain, abuse, impotence --
You wonder if the city can call such numbers.
Each message enters the brain subliminally
Never forgotten.
The names of those who flow past you
Fade away in the breeze.

The quiet whispers stop at your casual look
As if the dark bus were some sacred library
Compelling silence, like a holy place.
Shadows of silence dance through it like a cave,
The people outside unseen in the snow.

The city flashes past you, shapes blurring into forms
But you, here, move past it all, untouched by it,
The mover unmoved.

Winter Tree (2001)

Winter tree, barren of leaves and covered in frost,
Towering alone over that desolate hill,
Looking so pitiful and abandoned and lost:
Do you yearn for the caress of the children's shrill,
Care-free laughter and people playing in your leaves
And happily climbing towards you up your hill?

In the icy snows do even you believe
That they'll return to play in you again, Old tree,
And once again climb and play in your autumn leaves?
You wait for spring now, and it's a hard thing to see
In this winter tree clothed like death in winter's frost
The things in summers past you could have been to me.

A Life (2001)

Something falls toward the ground,
Lost amid the other sounds:
Slowly falling to the earth,
A death too soon after birth -
Now slowly surrendering,
Becoming a becoming.
The snowflake melts on the ground
And then dies - without a sound.

The Street (Feb 2002)

Crisp cold inhaled, warm ice exhaled,
Whispery fogs drift in the air,
Unformed ghosts of breath.
What street? What street is this?
Fog drifts in the mind, like cobwebs,
Dim light obscures instead of reveals.
He's been here before. He knows this.
But he is halfway down the street,
His footsteps embedded in the snow,
And he no longer knows
It's name.

           Cheeks burn slightly
As winds whistle through the streets
And play echoes of forgotten songs.
He wipes away a tear with an
Ice-encrusted glove and wishes
The wish of one who has no time
To wait for answers. If the fates
Are kind or unkind he may live
To see another spring, but his steps
Are leaden, weighted with stabbing pains
From the cold and his shoulders stooped
With memories, his dreams remote
And less real than the fog his breath makes.
But that he remembers more clearly
Than the day his daughter was born.
There is no spring for old bodies.
He wishes - while he still can wish -
That he knew the name
Of this once-known street
He is walking down.

Untitled (March 2002)

Autumn leaves nestled in trees,
Clinging in their terrible brightness.
Winter whispers "I am coming."
Spring whispers "I will come"
But how can we believe in spring
When it's so goddamn cold?