I hear my own guarded steps
turn again:
and a shudder of malformed prison bars
shadowing from street lamps.
I hear the wet pale snow
weighed with its first heaviness,
chill the heart of nearby oak.
And a strange winded silence
paces with me, collects.
I feel the street lamps flicker
block after block;
and my life’s sentence.

I feel the hard snow caress
with a cold sense of loss,
of once again losing.
I feel love melting on my cheek;
and the tears.
I walk into subtle torture,
buried in heavy snow,
enjoying, alive, the eloquence
of a slow condemned prisoner
And I see my footprints,
forming the night’s first clrcle
turn beyond the brittle light
and enter in the black falling snow.