Season Encroaching

Listen.

The world peels its skin in front of you,

lets its colors slump into the gutter,

and you still sigh, pretty.

You call this a “season,”

like it’s a playlist and not a slow disembowelment.

Some god switches the light to dim,

cranks the wind, cracks their knuckles over the hills,

and you write poems about it.

You poor, luminous idiot.

-

First frost sounds like a throat clearing.

A wet cough of gutters locking solid,

the snap of a stem as the last dahlia surrenders.

The grass goes from sigh to brittle whisper.

Crickets go missing mid-chorus.

The wind slaps the trees until they confess

their final leaves.

-

But I remember it as cozy, don’t I?

Breath puffing sugar-white in the air,

leaves doing their soft, spiraling suicide

like confetti just for me.

In the yellow streetlight, every puddle a mirror,

a unicorn could trot past in steam and sparkle,

fluffy rabbits might nest in the rust-red drift,

and I’d swear the cold was just the world

hugging me too tightly.

-

Listen closer:

overnight, puddles grow thin glass eyelids.

They blink once under your boot and shatter.

The garden falls silent, tomatoes deflating into slime,

stalks crumpling with a dry, papery gasp.

Somewhere under the mulch, a beetle curls wrong

and does not uncurl.

-

But isn’t it romantic?

Hands wrapped around a chipped mug,

cinnamon dust on the lip,

scarves smelling of woodsmoke and mulled wine.

Lanterns in windows, halos of amber,

children kicking leaf-piles that explode like laughter.

You can almost hear chubby cartoon birds sing

while bunny footprints stitch a story into the frost.

-

Hear that?

The hose in the yard, stiff as a dead vein.

Apples rotting down to wasp-riddled bruise,

thudding once, then never moving again.

The earth stops smelling like rain

and starts smelling like a closed mouth.

Branches scrape the roof, bone against bone,

signing your eviction notice in the dark.

-

Still, I want to believe.

In late sunsets smearing copper on the clouds,

in kisses that taste like smoke and apple peel,

in the way a single leaf spins down, show-off slow,

as if grace were a promise, not a glitch.

I tell myself this sharp air is cleansing,

this ache in my fingers is proof I’m alive,

that winter is just a blanket

the sky is tucking us under.

-

Pay attention.

That’s the last warm molecule

rolling between the teeth of the universe

before it bites down.

The passing of entropy in a white dress,

dragging her hem through leafmuck and road salt.

Your gods will freeze, too, one quiet day,

when the last star coughs out its final photon

into a sky that no longer remembers light.

First frost is just the opening note

of that long, grinding silence.

You stand in your pretty scarf,

listening to the world lock up around you,

and call it beautiful,

right up to the moment

it closes on your throat.

.