My walk is warm, holding a certain musical surge to it; a satyr in the winterlands, until I see kids turn the corner, and suddenly I reek of cigarettes. Hideous posture. I’m a scarecrow to the dog-walkers, the snow-shovelers, a gust that rolls windows up. There’s never a word of protest and maybe I misinterpret that. You might cut parts of your body so that they’re never touched again. Lust comes up aching, then bloody. This is a mire but there’s cities sitting crime-ridden, so we need to cherish the smell of compost and engine exhaust. First gas stations were detestable, now I suck up the viler oils.

  Dabble in syringes, you’re demented, but I have so fewer friends than last year. There are more important people who surrender their encouragement, and there’s grief in it. Somehow it’s selfish to stop returning their texts. They don’t know they just got their name crossed off the conscription list. Bullet’ hiss might’ve been more commendable. I’m tongue-tied and headed home again. The runaway’s ride, so familiar there’s a slash of placebo in my achilles. Visage of a cat coats a lamppost, missing. Dated far back enough I’ve no doubt it’s adorable white hide is gouged and splattered roadside. Only two tore the number. They flicked away the guilt and recycled the slip.

  Snows again. Something’s so primitive about jumping your chin to the sleet. You grapple just out from under the graphite and brick, breathe unbridled harvest. Jolly reaper, joined to the colds of ancestry, sensing a last, ensuring rhythm. Maybe it’s just different, new for a second, and that spares us. I let it sprinkle my hair, my cheek, my brow, bat it from my eye, then the experience is wrinkled and misses the closet. Laundry, needing renewal. Colder, wilder. They knew the same momentum and wore the same surname. Somehow, it’s different. Somehow, I’m wise in my boredoms. They didn’t have television and microwaves to leave to. Snow’s prettier when the window frames it, anyhow.

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  Then the starways flick, the switch clapped and imploded. An astral inversion spellbinds black snow sideways, glosses their spitters with its prudent oblivion. Rallying caliginosity, shrieking. Damning us. A hateful exchange of starways happens overhead. Cabals of snickering suns, boiling, bartering, pretzelling far away. Devoted to upend our spurning of the manslaughter’s and the murder’s and the suicide’s spotless nebula. A lightless absolution, there and obsidian then nothing.

  I lean to my side and shoot snot out my nose, onto the iced-over sidewalk. My nose gets runny when it’s cold. There’s a sudden panic in my belly of illness. Every time I’m unwell, life’s pushed back a little further. The sky’s dusty blue and my nostrils are dry.