Winter, Forever

January had turned over its fifth day and bitter cold was the pill that had to be swallowed. While the sun shone, it was through gusts of stony, miserable air that at once paralyzed and forcibly shivered you. The sun will fall down in a few hours and the darkness curl from the sky to impose winter upon and into you. The holiday of driving out the darkness has passed; nothing to save you from the black and frozen environment. A body at rest tends to stay at rest and winter covets motionlessness; covets, implores, slams its fists down in icy rages during screams of flurries amid pink, sensitive skin. Painful to the touch you become, from the inside out, while extremities numb and dull you and the sensation of you from the outside in, turning you into cold. Turning you, traitorous you, from the liar of summer and fall into the true you of winter. The true you, freezing immemorial, identical with immortality under gray drooping skies of immense, weathered, weight imposing, stopping, imposing, stopping…through a pulsating chorus of winter’s heartbeat in your pained ear and in your pained breast and in your slow heart. Cold it will be and cold it has been, cold is what you’ve know and what you will know. The summers and fall are gone, deserted you in your time of need, for they could not have helped, could not have given you what you need, for the you that you are in essence, a time tested stoppage of blood, a layered question within a question, towering over and cowering under a ubiquitous self, full of autumn lies and summer deceit…waiting….waiting…to stop.