The Winter Jazz

[Painting courtesy Anurima, artist, poet and writer; friend]

The Winter Jazz

winter charges the clocks
with a magic
that is otherwise found
in the hooves of unicorns

look out your window
and watch that dwarf
dangle from the hands
of one such clock

he looks like
a boy ran from home
to play videogame

inside the giant clock
sits his mother,
cigarette in hand
and unicorns in the eye;
she died sitting-
the mother of all winter stories.

and now the hands of the clock
cold and gloved
lift the dwarf to 1 o' clock
and teach him the secret of videogames.

warm and woolen,
you kneel in your room
and remember girls
with uncommon names

who bury their wombs
every winter.

“mother,
are you a ghost,
or are you a unicorn?”

“I am a ghost
dining on unicorns.”

at that thin reply,
the dwarf bares his hooves
and breaks
into the wet viscera
of the clock

inside, he clicks on doors and corridors.
and liberates the girls,
with very uncommon names,
from the al capone look-alike,

he finds them kneeling,
in their polygons
of terror and chocolate

It’s always like this in virtual poems.