How to Wake Up in January
You’re a hollow tree, listening
to the tapping claws of the sky.
You sit sideways staring over your shoulder.
A rib cage full of shivering cavemen
looks up into your throat.
Wintery seas leak over ice-bound rooftops.
Bedsheets stiffen into ersatz snowdrifts.
You find yourself observing the world
through the top of your head.
You find yourself observing raw endings,
frozen filaments on buffeted window.
Roads might be passable. Wind-whales plow through,
pushing insomnia ahead of them.
The cold is a color yet to be decoded,
but you breathe through it, see through its fractured eyes.
You count crow-calls, go deaf when they stop.
The passage between you and the chill floor
is umbilical, you may have to bear down.
You skirt around your skin.
Scrape eyes with rigid lashes,
letting your mind thaw under parked cars.
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