Snow.

I’m back to familiarity,

my new home, bullets flying,

hugging my own chest tight

like a bullet proof vest.

Empty nests rest neatly

in tree-tops, crusted lightly

with crystal angel dust;

the white sticks steady

to stems and leaves and

trunks like cellophane.

The silence somehow screams profane,

louder than words, charismatic,

like a Pentecostal church.

A dying birch or maple outlived

only by the mighty pine,

coated heavy with armor for

the coming winter.

Guarded by a chain-mail

of splinters, it stands alive

where things are dying.

Am I a pine—a figure standing,

living, where everything

around me heaves and breathes

their final breaths?

Either way, this paradox

of death and re-birth

has some kind of hidden intrinsic worth.

It would be pathetic if

the only value we find in this

is found in the aesthetic.

I see my own breath rise

and fall like Rome;

my own home becomes a

foreign place to even me.

Like everything I see is déjà vu,

instant replay of a life already lived.

How can you expect anything

from the man who has nothing more to give?

I feel like Steven, Rueben, Bruce,

any degenerate down from Jesus Saves:

broken and hurting and helpless.

I feel like the small sapling sprouting forth in September,

feeling my life prematurely culminating in November.