whiteout: a poem

Drugs, death and snow

Whiteout


The layers of snow, soft, enfolding
Switch to squares of infinity, multiplied
From outside in, no walls again
The sense of seeing everything as cloud.
A white cube inside a white cube
The outlines of a trapezoid enfold
The very whiteness that is parallel
Presents perpendicular as necessary black.


The salt is piled on crystal, seems oddly snow
Seems a metaphor for opposite lines that
Still sugar the past where whiteness comes
From the absence of colour, the absence of you.
I'm dead this winter.
The sensation of cold drizzle,
The unhurried progress of the pain,
Offers up emptiness.


I spooned it once, felt like God
For a few hours then called for the end.
Yet I walked so far this morning
Grass tufted with frost
Sky bleak as eyes of hungry crows
The lowering clouds dispelled hope.
Walking slowly, I stopped and screamed:
I will die this winter.


Explosions always leave debris, spark
Lesions, fissures, canyons
Falling into another drift.
You need to be cruel in ecstasy
The flesh cut to white bone.