Spoiler
Have at it, ye heathens.
Morning drags the round, white sun
Up to kiss the frozen earth,
To meet the hills between their summits
And lick the pines from slumbering root
To skeletal crown. Further still
Across the ashen sky as day advances,
Dripping pallid light like melted wax
upon the cold, cold world.
Evening descends as does the sun,
Its face red and swollen
Like exposed and freezing flesh,
On cheeks, on fingers, on breasts.
Nightfall carries the cruelest chill,
The numbness of a plummeting degree
Soothing tired limbs, staining skin
And aching muscle with a creeping stain of black
Like the drying dregs of an old ink well.
Over the edge of one high cliff,
Below boulders powdered with windswept snow,
Great gray waves foaming white and angry
Lap at a beach of polished pebbles,
Glistening like icy tears.
The waves, they roar with a hollow rush,
Like a chorus formed from the dying and dead,
Their roar carrying Warmth's requiem
Up on the wind to the throbbing ears of
Two lost runaways.
Those dying princesses
That had wandered months the harsh wastelands
Between their kingdoms and some beautiful,
Beckoning
Unknown.
Fighting, freezing, fading, it was only a matter of time
Before they arrived here,
To this,
To the end of the world.
Words with frosted, engraved edges,
Pass between them in mechanical formations like
Migratory birds cutting across the sky.
Familiar, anonymous, synchronized,
Faint.
The future extends only as far as their sight,
As far as a skeletal hand,
As far as a fire's smoke rises.
Amidst trees like iron spires piercing
Through the earth from the rooftops
Of a buried palace,
A tent, a circle of civilization, shivers
In the wind, illuminated from within
Like a rice-paper lantern.
So fragile.
A circle of heat and comfort to die away,
Die out with the darkness.
They hold each other.
They savor the heat of a soft stomach,
The steam of a breath, a kiss.
Darling, can you hear the snow falling,
The waves crashing,
The stars?
She whispers prayers and filament dreams,
And she replies with fading sighs.
Her lungs are filled with ice,
And her limbs have lost all feeling.
Morning carries a frosted sun
Up on the backs of clouds stained yellow,
And echo of bone, exposed teeth.
Hanging, a halo without shoulders to bear it,
The sun's rays seep into the fissures
In ice and stone and bark and girl,
Warming and melting.
A slow decay
Of porcelain winter and cold blue skin.
Like rivers running black beneath
A crystalline sheen of broken ice,
Their blood freezes in their veins
