Winter City? Frozen North? (fact)
Jack London’s “To Build a Fire”
or Sam McGee incarnate.
Too bloody cold for rats.
Snow blown across Xmas potholes.
Someone else’s bad dream
rammed down a senior’s throat
like feckless mayors, windrows
or snow-covered bike-lanes.
City of a dead downtown
awaiting invisible people.
Awaiting the day when the power
conks out for apocalyptic grid-hours
and all will simply freeze and die:
pets, plants, taps, houses, taxpayers.
Or else as some huddle in their monster trucks
idling the pipe-dream mirage
until all that UCP gas runs out.
(illustration by Frank Newfeld–of Alligator Pie fame–done for my first high-school English textbook in 1980’s Connections 1: Imagining)