winter
Then came winter. Its long shadow
cast a long darkness across colorless
fields, well before it was welcomed.
And the remaining autumn leaves,
those tiny dying fires, still clinging
to this world, became displaced in
crisp bitter wind, danced skyward,
drifting toward some place distant,
some place foreign, where retreating
sunlight refracts the splintered memories
of years gone by in the fractured shards
of broken glass along cold steel tracks.
And the lonely, still lonely, passed
through days like invisible ghosts
without anywhere to call home.
And beneath blue dusk everything
went quiet, everything became still.
And you stood there, a casual witness
to it all, knowing that no matter the
name of the town, no matter how far
you go, you can never outrun yourself,
you can never escape your past.
And despite your best efforts of trying
to convince yourself that there is some
place special, that there is some place else,
you came to understand that every new
beginning eventually ends and that
death will always call your name.
• • •
Tohm Bakelas is a social worker in a psychiatric hospital. He was born in New Jersey, resides there, and will die there. His poems have been printed widely in journals, zines, and online publications all over the world. He is the author of twenty-seven chapbooks and several collections of poetry, including Cleaning the Gutters of Hell (Zeitgeist Press, 2023) and The Ants Crawl in Circles (Bone Machine, Inc., 2024). He runs Between Shadows Press.