A Cold Day

I am flung against the drab ashen phonon sky, weighted with ghostly iron clad jaws of bitter winter's grip, biting the feather-flared Doves gravid with fatigue from the ill-laden onerous air. The rough-coated dog with ice-tipped ears had surrendered to the corridor of gutters in the toilsome cold, a fugitive of neglect of his own demise. In this empiric city, a shrine of humankind, vespers of frozen conflict rose up from its bowels, like sweat from otherworldly gargoyle watchmen of stone and mortar atop the surrounding spires of fortune. Beneath the steeples of holy crosses and frozen muted lights, faceless, heavily cloaked phantom transients trudged through half stacked drifts of dirty snow moving farther away from hazard, blinded in their apathy. The grimy yellow cab bedraggled on its mucky, viscous boulevard strained and bellowed as a labored oxen. Desperate, surreal sirens blaring from a distant byway echoed and purged from the back alley resort of homeless, despondent souls, laying like pale-blue corpses in garbage bins that sheltered their weakness - interred in their obscure tombs chasing their fate in a bottle of booze. And I stood frozen in the moment, displaced with the cold reality in my icebound, paralytic soul, shuddering with hurt. ice laments silence cloaked in bitter winter's grip trapped in bitter spires December 17, 2019 December or January Haibun Poetry Contest Moments of Reflection - Haibun Poetry Contest Sponsored by Malabika Ray Choudhury