Black Ice Poem by Kevin Patrick

Like a predator waiting to
ruthlessly spring
Invisible and flagitious
As a feral virus
Ready to graze lose skin and bone

It wraps itself, tightly, onto every surface
from roadways, stairs and sidewalks
Chocking black asphalt beneath
bastilles of cloaked ice

Leaving seas of glass
Entombed under
The bleached
earth

Nothing escapes its lubricous talons
It vitreous jaws dutifully shatter
Tender limbs and ligaments
Trapping gravities legs
To drunken motions
Of broken bones

Every step becomes a calculated dance
Over glacial minefields of banana peels
The pavement can be your down payment
To a one way trip to the hospital
It takes finesse of a burley juggler
Walking tightropes over the lions teeth
To walk across this no mans land snipers frost
sounds of Styrofoam snow on your boots
Confirms the rigorous treaty nature tenders
This beauty so fragile and yet so deadly
Can turn you into Charley Chaplin's stunt double
Careening into cartwheels of a graceless elephant


Trepidation
Becomes your friend
When every delicate inch
Could put you in the cast of schadenfreude


Its funny
that this canvass
Of unconscious hydrogen
water sleeping as fractured glass
Can shatter me into a million pieces
Beneath smooth ebony frost,
And leave me crying
On my funny
bones


Walking on
Perilous Opacity
as furrowed fault lines
Create waves like drip paintings
As my legs skate over
This empire of
Iced Graffiti


Black Ice
Is a landmine
And cruel gallery
Of winters
soul