i put the win in winter.

and this is what victory looks like:
nice hole, huh?
you like it, probably because it's so small and tight.
(that's what she said)
olive the dog is ALL about creepy, stinky spaces.
that's why she's over here holding down the fort in good guard dog mode.
take a little notice of how her ears are all perked up;
she's on orange alert for burly, burrowing, b!tch-sap sappers.
why would that be a concern?
because of the spanish-moustached spelunker scraping around down there!
yeah, duders,
that's a headlamp on my brow.
a regular 'great escape' tunnel rat.
but i'm still smiling an' that.
i'm also taking up every last scooch of area in that deep dark dungeon.
it's good thing having a scrapey gape in my house isn't getting old at all.
but really,
just how many days of crawling on my hands and knees,

or flat on my belly,

in a doo-doo buttery asthma cavern is too many?

i'm not sure there has ever even been such a thing

as too much of a bad thing.

should i be worried, now that i'm starting to like it down there?

what's more of a concern is the fiberglass foulness in my eyes

and the creosote fury in my lungs.

black tears came out of my face yesterday,

and i wasn't even sad or anything

-y'know what they say about big girls an' all that-

still, it's MY party, and i will if i want to;

i'm pretty sure that's not good.

neither was the naughty-list lump of anthracite i coughed up afterwards.

y'know something, my ninjas?:

when i promised to stay black,

i didn't mean in my lungs.

***********

i'm on that hard-style solstice season-change dark day action.

i'm sayin',

it's winter now.

or at least,

today is day one of the cold times, redux, on the calendar.
5:47 p.m., ya'll.

that's when the blazing barbarian bonfires get lit the F* up.

i love hard times.

i love long nights.

tonight's the longest hardest one.

the darkest darkness,

the farthest from warmth we'll be no matter how much colder it gets.

light averse long leaning axis angles cast long long shadows, ya'll.

i'll set all those dark spots dancing by the light of the hot hot fire.

y'know why winter is so dope?

because each year we begin and end with it.

one chilled-out concentric circle overlapping another.

frost ring smoke rings,

spirit and memory;

the mark of any good storyteller is to knit it all together in the end,

starting and stopping with what happened at the beginning.

and so i'll be burning a cage of fiery rage in honor of this last chapter of 2009.

and i'll be home early-shirley from work to doo-doo it, too.

you can have the woods without the goods,

but you can't have the hottness withot the hot fire.

that's non-negotiable.

hot fire is compulsory;

never quiet, never soft.....