The Undead of Winter

It pretends to be warm but it’s not really warm, like an ice goddess in a fur coat. 

It feels like the world is coming alive, but it’s not, it’s still dead, it’s just putting the lie in alive, and I walk hand in hand with it because I want to believe it, because I feel the promise in the air, and frankly?  Because there’s nothing that makes me feel more alive than walking arm in arm with 60 degree Fahrenheit weather . . .

And life is what this femme fatale is after, my life, my warmth.  She leans in for a kiss, and I close my eyes, and like a door slamming in my face just as I walk up to it, a hard sub-freezing wind will blow it all away, will hit me like a thousand little nails, will slice through shirt and flesh to pierce my heart, the teeth of something that hungers for the warmth of my blood.

All I want to do is curl up into a ball, a ball of down, pun intended, with all my branches bare and my roots dried up and gasping.  And then the ground grows moist and I start to bud, and just as a shoot of green appears, it’s sliced away by an Arctic blast, to the sound of bitter laughter in the wind.

It’s not really warm.  I keep telling myself that, but the sun on my skin laughs at me and says I'm insane, of course it's really warm, would I feel this way if it wasn't?

All right, I think, it's warm, yes, warm, but it's heartless warmth, it's bloodless heat.  I keep telling myself that, but I have so much energy that my body is laughing at me, and saying that I'm delusional, how can warmth be heartless, how can all this energy be bloodless?

And I give in.  It’s a forgery of spring, but it’s such a perfect forgery that I don't notice it--I don't want to notice it--because it gives me what I want.  Until it doesn't.  

It’s a warm kiss that turns into a cold bite, and when it does, I think, “Thank God I’m so withdrawn that I can’t feel it.”

But I can feel it.

I do feel it.

I always feel it

Feel it in my bones

Feel it reach into my bones

The cold seductive touch

Of winter in my head

That says hearts do not beat

They are not allowed to beat

Or else they beat too much

For something cold and dead