One Moribund Winter Poem by Windsor Guadalupe Jr

You took turns in glancing at photographs,

And marvel at crooked lines and wry chortles

Diamonds pealed from the sky, like laughter

From an infant’s soft, composed mouth

From pictures adorned with dust,

From lies and disdain filtered by rust

-

There will be a place where the lime

Across the veneer of the atmosphere

Would land on the clouds, far from one’s reach

You would cry, scowl upon the world

And how fate must have played a trick on you

Because as farce as it may seem,

You’ve cast the trick on yourself.

-

The mirrors were lying,

As they flashed a maiden

Behind a veil, glinting, flustering

An ornate smile, now turned ostensibly wrong

In a few words we were saying everything,

And in a swift moment – hastier than the crisp breeze,

You were leaving.

-

And thieves come past the doors

To remind you of the things that you have lost,

Laconic affair strewn pretty loosely

So as to wear off in a few years time,

Where the days ran off into the woods, beguiled

Never to return again, I am marred in the night’s peculiar voice

-

This will be the day that we will be

Deciphering everything, decoding every quizzical stare

We will be resenting every woman, every man

That we can never have,

For fate is as cruel as the tempest at night

Or if fate is real, then it must have been obsolete

By the time people knew how to love.

-

In one more year you cut your hair,

Change your clothes and alter your scent

And you convince yourself in barren rooms

And headless crowds that you are different,

That you have transformed into something new

Only to recognize that you have a stranger hue,

Nothing that I ever knew.

-

So the moribund heart on furlough,

Has been enduring tender fields of snow,

With snowflakes dissipating, creating identities

Across willow trees and petrified brooks

In the winter, I am here.

I am here.