It's nothing all around you
Or at least
Nothing you're attached to
Pure white
Whiter than wash
Whiter than trash
Whiter than feathers
Whiter than being able to move without tethers
Whiter than a bucket carrying a tune with a hole in it
With a crack in it
With no soul in it
And of course it's cold
and it's
Silent
You don't hear anything atop the glacier
No friction, nothing to brace for
But like a slow and broken exhale to the aether
The cracks form
Without warning
Like a death sob unbottling a stoic lovers mourning
The land beneath your feet shifts from stolid peace
Into a piece
Into pieces
From the nothingness comes emptiness manifest as something deep
Fractures
in what we know as
whole
As capable a containing vessel as any glass that shatters
They hold
Pain
pressed outward into patterns
that we name as art
but that nature needs to scatter
The cracks are not an enemy they are a process
And a start
They look the same as river tributaries
and concert mosh pits
As blood vessels
and capillaries
As lightning from a storm
Random
and ordered
and torn
Our cracks can occur from collisions of all kinds
Soft, soft as falling snow
So soft it's impossible to know which flake broke the mold
Sudden, as sudden as the grave
And silent or not, indicative of a bed already made
Slow, slow like mascarpone
Slow like years, like weeds in concrete, like growing bones
And amounting fears
And mossy, rolling stones
And old, rusty unwieldy shifting gears
And home
The soft
And slow
And sudden
Of change you didn't see coming
Of internal pressures already felt
A thing beginning to die
The moment when atop your frozen glacial life
Of stillness
Atop your icy existence
We have to contend with
Now
We absolutely have to cry
As it's our deeply held belief that cracks are never meant to be
Our unknowing that the natural state of most ice is to be flowing
but still we
Crack and break and bruise and tear
Believe that we can keep love solid without care
Operating in silence
Ignoring that cracks appear
The moment the whole finds itself contending with falling apart
The process starts
And instead of becoming new
We sheer
