Hanging on, just scraping by,

Keeping my head above water

I'll never learn to fly

In this monochrome world

Of silence stripped of consciousness

We rise with the superfluity of deceit

I remember a snow-laden sky moving in slow motion

As always an innocence of birds catches the eye.

On the beach, I am hunched up, driven by the freezing wind

This wind that crosses the  sea bringing the migrating birds

Fleeing from Siberia or the Arctic, 

Come to exculpate our many sins, test our visceral hold-on

Each others' frozen hands as we stagger along the beach

Yesterday out of reach, searching for a place to be,

Buffeted, battered, no-man mattered, tasting the sea salt in the spray

Wishing it was any other blue winter day.