Bone Cold [Blank Verse Sonnet]

From a stove-heated room, the snow brightens
one's mind with hope that all will be made clean,
but cleanliness is next to nothingness
and nothingness is next to loneliness.
From inside, snow is silencing and light.
It's fine and shifts like sand in desert dunes.
It's silent like the depths of a cabin
at midnight on the prairie before time.

From outside, snow saps all of one's resolve,
and makes one wish to flee the purity
it pretends to generate all around.
The cold, it bites like a full-body vice.

The feet go numb, but brains... they fire wildly --
they shake one awake, but dare one to sleep.

Schrödinger’s Isle [Blank Verse Sonnet]

The island's rocky columns rise upward.
Its gray and green was tiny, but now looms.
A giant jutting rock that stands on high,
and shades the white sand beach and coral sea.

This island will be home from now 'til doom.
One's gratitude for fists of sand first swells,
but it will crash in time with tedium.
Could a sea death beat solitary life?

One lives and dies by coconut water --
day after day - week after week,
and dreams of company and comfort food,
while knowing this is hell and paradise.

What prison is this island - place unknown -
that like Schrödinger's box shrouds life & death?

Last Blossom [Blank Verse]

The final flower falls to the sidewalk.
It's damp and deformed, -n- sugared with sand.
It's gritty and pretty at the same time.

The ants are crawling around and across.
A faintly putrid scent must call to them.
They crave that little bit of death in food.

And tomorrow it'll be gone -- somehow -- gone.
Who knows where: swept up, carried, or wind-blown.
It will be gone, and branches will be bare.