Spent the fading mid-winter afternoon light
looking through curtained kitchen windows
into white-out fields.
The static picked up on your yellow plastic radio plays:
the perfect soundtrack
to these white-out days.
Of all the things we could have seen,
I can't tell the trees from what was make believe.
Of all the things we could have found,
I can speak only in mystery for the white-out days.
A few long years ago it wouldn't have taken much
for us to welcome the winter and bury our heads in snow.
Our faces came up beat red,
bright-lit and laughing, out of breath.
Clothes and skin wet and cold,
but we hadn't a care in the world.
We could put off warming our bodies
next to the space heater
in your dark basement until later -
a few long years down the road,
when we have to brave the weather
just to keep our date across town.
Why even think to move?
While outside, rapping at our windows,
there are too many ghosts wrapped in thin white cloaks.
Things long dead,
but more alive than we are as men
of a digital depression.
Everything's electronic, artificially warm.
Computer screens replace windows in the new homes I've heard;
the digital need.
Wandering spirits don't have a need for anything,
they just are. Free to float and fade forever, feeling.
Released from time
They sublimate from bare bedroom windows
as we listen through static on a mail order radio:
the perfect escape
into white-out days.
Of all the things we could have seen,
I can't tell the trees from what was make believe.
Of all the things we could have found,
I can speak only in mystery for the white-out days.
