GOSSIP

The ghastly whispers came creeping around us

Like cold fingers

Touching, lingering, ever grasping

Grasping in the corners of our minds,

Reaching without ceasing, reaching while

I waited breathlessly

To see what they would find.

Would they find my deepest darkest fears?

The ones I kept wrapped in so many snowy blankets?

The ones I never unwrapped, and liked to see

All wrapped up like little neat bundles, so neat

No one would ever think, or even want to

Disturb?

Would they linger over the bindings of all those

Snowy swaths? Would they caress the smooth

texture, run fingers around the strips of snow?

Could they feel? Could they feel that though

The texture was fleecy, soft, it was also cold?

So cold no fire could ever warm it? So cold

The swaths of cloth must hide remnants of some long ago

Ice Age?

Would they feel it? And if they did...

Would they have to explore, unwrap, layer by snowy layer?

Layer by Ice Age layer?

Would the fingers peel back the layers to expose

All the truths of a long ago past,

Oh so many eons ago, so many mammoths ago,

So many wooly mammoths ago.

Would the fingers pause as they came to that last layer...

And feel the cold so deeply it burned the flesh

And burned the bones of those ghastly whispers,

And ached to creep into the voices of them?

And what of the others?

Did they wrap their eons, their ages, their mammoths

In snowy blankets too, and push them back,

Far back, into the dust and cobwebs of forgotten yesterdays?

Did they do that too? Was this universal?

This cloaking of truth in softness, in purity,

In hidden places that even they could not discover again?

Well I can tell them...

Ghastly whispers come creeping.

They come creeping around us all

Like cold fingers

And they find us all out,

They peel the snowy layers of all that is hidden,

And they ache, they burn

Until the whispers grow in strength.

Cold fingers are attached, you see,

To cold hearts.