Morning Frost

The warm wind raging merrily outside
Is ignoring the frost on my window.
It’s a systematic attack on all I possess
By ruthless crystals
That have suddenly sprung up this morning
Out of nowhere
On my walls, my window, my floor.
They will soon creep up my legs
The icy claws clinging to my flesh.
They will reach up
Unafraid of melting in the pitiful warmth
Of my chest.
I will be covered in this horrid, wet chill -
The steaming nostrils
And a sweaty brow
Buried under a delicate film of numbing frost.

It comes from within me,
This dangerous enemy of farmers,
The killer of infant crops, fragile dreams.
Creator of road accidents.
Here, in the darkened room
That is its latest conquest,
It rose from something warm –
A part of me –
That seeped out from all the orifices
Steadily till I was drained,
Making tiny rivulets of steaming angst
And left a dying smell
Of green grass crushed under bare knees.
A smell holding years’ worth of dreams
Shining golden in the death cry of the sun last evening.

It seeped through my fingers
When I tried to stem it,
becoming suddenly unconcerned,
Outrageously rebellious against me
Leaving my insides writhing
As if I had vomited myself inside out.
The stream trickled to a pattering end
I shut my eyes, nauseated.
That dearest of all smells
flew out of the still-open window
After half-hearted tries to drape me,
Hold me tight
Become a part of its home again.

And now that warm life-blood has returned,
Mutated into something horrible.
A frozen, malicious sheet of ice
That is immune to my body heat
Even the bright sun and the full-blooded wind.

It has taken hold of me,
Though my fretting movements
Still deny it the final joy –
A layer of expressionless ice on my skin.
But it has found entry
Into my marrow
My lungs
And the complicated network of arteries,
The ones whose names I saw in a medical dictionary long ago.

My fingers dance to its whims,
And I can’t control
The squiggling white worm of toothpaste
That is dying somewhere in the sink
Squeezed out mercilessly
Like I have been.
I am trying to conform
To this new acquaintance
But the shivering hand holding the razor
Is leaving behind tiny nicks on my chin
To match the dead eyes
Framed by angry red webs -
where children of fear and confusion
Have made a shack.

I want to risk a look inside my body
To estimate the damage.
The attempts of a shaken man
Trying to salvage a few pieces of furniture
From a flood-hit house.
It’s unbearably cold and empty.
Crude piles of iced ruins
Form a crippled, deformed crowd
Savoring the remnants of that prolonged rape.
My voice returns to me
In this maddening Hall of Echoes,
Colder, alien and unhelpful,
Bounced off stone and barren walls
All covered in frost.

The darkness in my room
Is impenetrable
Now that the window is jammed tight
And the glass coated with film upon film
Of silent, unforgiving ice.
I curl up on the cold, moist bed
Holding myself tight
Shivering in the unwelcome chill
That is here to stay.
That has replaced everything
In the once warm mansion of mine.

While the sun burns down the world...