To catch a seasonal cold

 

To catch a seasonal cold 

Once every season I shed this shell

This hard, cold, old skin

Tired and worn by long loops of dry hell

I moult and dare to bare again my self.

Every once I fall, I fall well

Fall right flat for a woman

 

I love her fierce

To the skies up there

Where I send my heart

And I cause the clouds

To crowd and darken

To crowd and cry, to rain

On my way home

In this rain I hide my tears

In this rain where my heart is not my own

And I worship her name

In the rain.

 

Every once, in the caught breath

In the fleeting flare

I love in full abandon

In the moment between rain

And grown grass

I fall and cry and refuse consolation

Then slowly pull out a hanky-

The plain-hemmed-plain-brown type

We all back-pocket-

The type that reads-

‘Save Your Tears’.

And grass grows so hard

A horse gallops on it

And a snake slithers in it

And rain cannot be coming soon.

 

When

A heart’s taken out to air

In the wrong season

In a wind full of fury

And cold has

flown into it

Blown it cold as stone

So you hear a whoooo!

In the hollow of the heart

a hollowful of emptiness

The hollow that echoes unto itself

Cold blown into a heart now hollow

Full of the one feeling

-It own hollowness

That forty summers in a row

Couldn’t the frozen heart thaw;

That forty summers of days

Without nights

Back to back cannot mend

Cannot bend

Cannot break the cold silence

Of a broken heart.