A Lust for the Coolth

Today I am coiled and maleficent, squatting in the corner eating meat off the bone. Slimy dreams and sweat-sopped sheets have conspired to clog up something within me. I can see fingers underneath all the furniture, double-jointed and mucky-knuckled, undulating implausibly and stretching towards my toes. The future is circling, a clacking, scabrous raven, calling carrion to its bone-beaked brethren. I blame the sarcastic summer, raising her skirts of nimbus and mist and pissing on us while St Swithin watches and wanks himself sick.

Curse this can’t-be-arsed pseudo-summer, clinging to us like wet blankets, muggy and claggy and no good to anyone. I want the winter back, crabbed and skinning, cauled with hoar-frost, ghastly, grinning, walking backwards like the dead. The winter that strips the trees to whips that slit my skin and let me back inside again. I want the winter moon, a cold mother in a cap of bone, I want the frigid air that shoves its fist deep down your throat and steals away your breath and I want the snow that comes slow, not falling, just ambling through the air like a billion drunken white bees, then falls faster, niveous, insidious, to coat the world like ash. A cold Pompeii.