seasonal affective dirge

the cold moves into my bones

like a squatter claiming rights to an abandoned house;

I stop venturing out to the porch to smoke my cigars.

inside, the vents churn and tick,

burning the dust of six months, the scent of it

heavy in the air for one day,

setting my throat to aching.

.

the geese have departed-

I've stopped seeing them

on my drive into work but I haven't stopped

imagining what it would be like to be one,

to spread wings I only dream of having and fly

away in an arrow formation to somewhere

kinder than here.

.

the trees become bony cryptids, skeletal

gray limbs spread across the sky. through them

I can see what has been hidden before: a barren field,

an old rope swing, a rusted, abandoned tractor-

and farther off, the lit window of another house

like a pat of butter against the dark

that falls too heavy and too soon.

.

my heart is like an abandoned airport in these days,

a heavy constant that has seen so much come and go.

the hearth in the room where you died

is rarely lit anymore, though the holiday songs

on the radio are all the same. 'tis the season

for memories, and melancholy, and woe; grey

horizonless days when I stuff myself at the

kitchen table like a hole that needs plugging, satisfied

only when I am uncomfortably full (and I regret to inform you

I am never full).

.

the rooms in my mind are turning off the lights

when they're not being used;

mornings, my car is covered more often than not in

tessellated frost that I waste eloquent amounts

of washer fluid wiping impatiently from the windows.

I always seem to be late wherever I am going;

it is so hard to wake, and after

waking, so pointless to drive, if driving only

brings me to another place

you are not.