2 Poems

Snowblindness

What has life to tell me today?
Outside there is a small snowing
fury, more light than there
really is because of the
refracting whiteness.
Imagine
if snow was red
or blue or black,
or rainbow. How
different our winter psyche
would be.

Stop the struggle,
Life says.
__________

My Addiction

I wanted to look at
my unhappiness as
an addiction, but I knew
that
in using a label I am
putting the whole ball
of wax—teeth, hair, claws and all—
into a ready-made mould.

It is a perspective, one
defined by other people’s
ideas of addiction, but it
also stops me from seeing
it any other way. Peeling

back the label then, there is
just the usual yawning
chasm of a black nothing.
I’ve stood on this precipice many times,
looking down into its indifference. It is
oddly quiet
and still,
and I am calm
in the absence of anything.

I’ll stay here for a while,
navel-gaze at this black hole
inside me…

There seems to be, in the middle
distance, a shape that’s sharply conical,
tapering down into the vastness, its
lines glinting barely, but clearly
in my mind. There’s something
surgical about it, as if it’s capable
of boring with immeasurable precision
into the densest, hardest dark. I wonder

what such an instrument is
doing in the bowels
of my nothingness. It is as still
as everything else is here, and
I know it’s never been set
into motion, never been used.

Ought I to turn it on
then, as it seems to imply
a depth that I hadn’t known
was there, unplumbed. (Who’s
ever heard of a deep that comes
with its own auger?) Uncertainty
sparks around my head, it is the air
that I draw, the gap between me
and my greatness. It is
the negative matter this
hole is made of.

Uncertainty.

The sucking mud of paradise
lost that is now frozen. My
selfhood in it trapped
like fish from the last
age, mid-gasp.

It is the source of coldness in me,
what you turn away from.

I am mortalized
in discontent.

If only I could turn
myself inside out, bring
the black hole of nothingness
into the light of day, it would
become the mantle of
nothingness I could wear
on lonely treks
along the Middle Way.

The augur whirs,
virgin metal winking
in collusion.

It’s time to go down. Are you
ready?