Early Mornings And Ice Storms Poem by Max Dahlquist

I love snowflakes
because they're symmetrical
and unique
and frigid with disinterest
and make me want
to kill kill kill until spring.

In early February ice fell with a vengeance
until I couldn't walk without falling,
until even the gutters and filth
were beautiful,
and all the boughs were bowed
like handcuffed drunks,
shameful and shackled under a half inch glaze
of freezing rain.
Transformers popped and sent cascades of sparks
in unnatural colors,
like grenades or mortar shells
and gave old men flashbacks
of Vietnam, of darker times
that I shouldn't bring up
because I wasn't there
and couldn't possibly understand.

We stayed inside as the heat fell
and I think you drank too much
but that might have been me,
and everything ran together;
jokes and the mental breakdowns
of people who don't understand how
to simplify, for one miserable day.

and we sat in nothing,
with hair that stuck to our foreheads
and eyes that wouldn't look upward
until finally the lights flickered and returned,
the winter forgot what it was doing,
and everything thawed except me.