Ten Ways to Awake in January

You’re a hollow tree, listening to the tapping claws of am exposed sky. You sit sideways staring over your shoulder. A rib cage full of naked troglodytes looks up into your throat. Wintery seas leak over ice-bound rooftops. Bedsheets come to rest as snowdrifts. You find yourself observing the world through the top of your head. You find yourself reading the pale blue veins on a frozen 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, red tongue slipping through clouds of needles. You count crow-calls, shiver when they stop. The passage between you and the chill floor is umbilical, you may have to bear down. You skirt the edges of yourself, until your mind thaws beneath parked cars.