Winter, Devour Me|poem

On stepping barefoot into the merciless clarity of dawn

I step beyond the threshold as one who dares a verdict,
bare soles pressed to the iron breath of dawn,
and the cold, that pale and patient conspirator,
rises at once to greet me.

It nips first at my feet—
not cruelly, no—
but with the sharp intimacy of teeth
testing bone,
as if to ask whether I am flesh or merely a dream
that forgot to wake.

Upward it travels,
a silver serpent of sensation,
coiling round my ankles,
climbing the tender columns of my calves,
laying claim to knee and thigh
with a lover’s relentless devotion.
It is meticulous in its ascent.
It wastes nothing.

My breath becomes visible,
a ghost fleeing my mouth in small, frantic prayers,
and I stand there,
offered to the morning like a confession
no one demanded
yet heaven insists upon hearing.

There is something in the cold
that strips pretense from the marrow.
It pares me down
to pulse and tremor,
to the frantic percussion of a heart
that cannot pretend indifference
when winter’s fingers are closing around it.

In warmth I drift.
In warmth I forget the edges of my own existence.
But here—
in this crystalline cruelty,
this immaculate severity—
I feel every boundary of myself
as though I have been sketched again
in frost.

The cold works its way upward,
claiming my ribs,
threading icy hymns between them,
tightening my lungs into bright, aching clarity,
until even my thoughts seem sharpened
to fragile glass.

And I am alive.

Not comfortably,
not safely,
but with a ferocity that borders on revelation.

For the cold does not cradle—
it awakens.
It does not soothe—
it demands.

It says: Be here.
It says: Feel this.
It says: You are not a shadow drifting through tepid hours—
you are blood, you are nerve, you are flame
defying the frost that seeks to master you.

So I remain,
feet stung and trembling,
skin singing with its exquisite assault,
and I offer myself to that ruthless purity again—
again—

because in the cold,
where the world is stripped to bone and breath,
I am most undeniably,
most painfully,
most gloriously alive.

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