Vines in Winter

Passionflowers winter-wilted and passionless, twining around the treillage of a wintry world, winter-weakened, flower-frail in the ice-vice of cold's hold. Ice-ivy creeping and strangling; a crunching and grinding like sharded glass beneath boots, around roots, an unearthing, uprooting, a tugging, unaware of track marks vine-twining winter-pale arms. Every street corner a trellis or snare, stems/limbs overexposed and bare, petals loveless, neglected and crushed, long since fallen and gone. Plucked/f****d fallen flowers, dropped and discarded. Polar touches on skin stamen-thin, clematis-veined stems bending and breaking, lifelines buried beneath snow-weighted winter. Blizzards tearing off tendrils one by one. The groped now groping, hankering for anchoring, fruitlessly reaching to cling to a trellis of care, to wind around whatever support they find, the little that's there. A frigid fondling and fingering, gelid entwining and fusing, naked and numb flowers forced open before or after their time. A scarlet staining, seeping of sepals, a bedding and shedding, a shaming. Moonseeded moans on glacial winds, aching and echoing, emptied into the emptiness of one more indifferent morning, rejected, discarded, no stems/arms strong enough to hold the cold at bay, or keep the frost-frail flowers intact as they fall in a secret and silent shattering.