When they will arrive. Turning us inside out, seeing them behind our eyes and clawing at them, to no avail. Unravelling skies the pretty tapestries burning under their siege. They are coming.

There is silence in your violence.

Horrified by their chirruping, running and running. Air hot and heavy swirling around and creating little eddies as of hell's furnaces. First came the plagues. Then the worms.

I saw one of them. With eyes that I now long to pluck from my head, claw them out and smash them so they forget. They are here.

And there, see! They do not care.

What do trees speak about in winter?
the long silences and clarity
of bone exposed to star
the echoing nights and the frivolity of squirrels
sleep and dream and waking
and the deep roots, stirring, turned
against a frozen edge of loam time
Slowly, they say,
move slowly
do not hurry
be naked
hush
the calligraphy etched on sky
will speak in it's own time

We broke bread in the ellipses of their empty mouths, their frosted windows like yellowed novelty teeth chattering in the hungry winter wind. And when at last we'd picked the bones of conversation clean, the palsied brownstones spat us back out into the pools of night to drown in manic isolation.