Cozy

words for blankets and rain splashed windows

To begin,
take a few deep breaths.
Slow down. 
Enter into a calm.

Flip the Internet television world wide website
to the channel where the fire is crackling,
not the one with the tingy attempt at carols,
not the one where the fire fades out
and reveals the room full of toys
and lights and trumpets playing
pops and jazz seasonal standards,
not the one that is supported
by advertisements for skin related medications, 
class action lawsuits, and good smelling
chemicals for your clothes.
Flip on the fire channel that pops and crackles
with a satisfying and steady woosh,
and the image is the slow deterioration
of a wood log tripod collapsing in triangulated flame
housed in the rectangular space behind
the brick archway whose top is cut out of the
video frame, the one with the gradient
of orange, red, yellow, purple, blue heatwave
distorting the embers below the whipping flames.
There’s no need to upgrade to the 4k paid subscription,
especially if your Internet provider provides
unreliable data speeds. In fact, there’s something
traditional and warm feeling about
the occasional pixelated pop of out of focus motion.
It’s old fashioned, like late autumn demands of us.
Slip out of your shoes and wiggle your sock toes
at the screen depicting the Internet television 
world wide website fire channel
while you breathe calmly and imagine 
the heat that prehistoric humans would have known.

Optional Sensory Upgrade: 
Plug in your decades old space heater,
flip it to its highest setting and smell 
the subtle fumes of summer’s dust 
burning away.

Hey friends, my friend Garrett Mostowski wrote an excellent collection of poems called Lunations. You can quickly find it here. If you enjoy book reviews where the reviewer uses the book as an excuse to write about themselves, you may enjoy reading this.

In wordy wordiness,

Walter