January

All of me was wrong that day, 
when I woke up
in the late afternoon, with the blinds wide open.

The snow shined up,
The clouds glared down,
And the trees reached both ways into the searing emptiness,
grasping for even more nothing.

And the window was just
a blinding square 
on the wall of a box,
painted purple and black and blue.

The walls were swelling inwards,
crushed by the weight of the colorless sky, 
and my blue eyes bruised, ached, and turned away.
How can something glow so bright and be so dull?
when did blue become grey?

The whole world was blank, and I was barely a part of it.

I could feel it
in the drag
of every limb
And every thought,
Like molasses.

I could feel it
in the way thoughts rolled off my brain 
like rainwater on glass;
And I felt ready to shatter.


If only it didn’t take so much energy.


But the awful, dreamy fog 
of baseless sorrow,
was holding me.
Gentle, perhaps, but no less devious,
And I know it intimately, I do.
but today it is too late, 
and I am all wrong,
and there is nowhere to run anymore.

Relief and regret twist together in sync,
lifted by the room-temperature wrongness of fatigue,
blooming up heavy from the pit of my stomach.
Slate grey petals and leaden vines, leeching all the way out to my fingers tips
and drawing me down, down, down 
like the loneliest embrace.

Never. I’ll never move again, I think.
And the hours fall away.

Meanwhile, the box swells and aches,
color crying out,
threatening to cave in to the outside expanse. 

The whole world glitters and shines, almost defensively,
and even it's anguish is a bright flash, for the reflections come back jarringly empty. 
The whole world, washed out, screams a silence into itself,
and leans unforgivingly against the battered walls. 

It wants to get in.

But who will break the 2nd dimension?

On a cold January afternoon, a window latch frosts over, untouched.

And two grey eyes hide
from the blinding blankness, 
shut out the squares 
on the wall of the box 
of purple and black and blue.

And fade.