Sometimes Things Happen in Winter

                                Sometimes things happen on long Winter days in the city. Streetcars grudgingly motor past cemented sidewalks splashing muddy puddles on grim merchant pedestrians. Interpersonal relationships get sordidly kicked to the gritty curb. Tumultuous societies of feeble men and women feed off each other in vulturous expectation.
                                We drank wine across from each other on lucid evenings among outdoor seating arrangements. Illustrious vehicles whipped past dark cornered intersections, along soiled alleyways of old barbaric ritual. We both worked for a living. Friday night was the time we looked forward to the most. Now going eight or nine years back; I vaguely recall an amorous aura circling meticulously around a young woman's expression. Delicate feminine features below straw rustic hats. We looked into each others eyes, fatigued and interwoven. Nighttime chemicals and promiscuous charades of intermittent folly. Her name was Maggie.
                               P.M. rooftop shingles layered with frozen sludge water. Prior to morning speculation, through dusted glazed eyeball framing. Residential weariness. A subtle glow permeated narrow fluorescent hallways. Bedroom vestibules that led to staircase landings; residing below dimly-lit attic storage canals. Eastern and civilized on defiant timelines. Ancestors remain only in well-furnished living room portrait portrayals. Scented candles and afternoon wallpaper refracted furnace heat; in remission from brutal December days. Midwestern elementary school education delirium. The foundation of wondrous teenage premonition.
                              Now there was another woman I used to refer to as "a manipulator". I adored her adamantly; never desiring another woman the way I did her. Years later finding out it wasn't so; that is a different story. In fanatical dreams I lost sight of her. Through suburban outskirt windows, new lust took hold of me. Learning the hard way how to avoid kicking in '96 Ford Taurus windows in toxic drunken frenzies.
                            Decades later I presently refer to loose manuscripts describing past suffrage. Screaming and kicking in morbid agony and defeat; through long thwarted January nights. Adorned beige hospital beds in northern urban arenas. The malnourished city took my tenuous sinews for a brief thunderous ride down deaths narrow corridor. I bled like a wild pig in fertile heat. Shook it away in methadone tremors. They put me in rehab, only to come out with new misdemeanor charges.
                             Snowdrifts embalmed entombed February landscapes. In school: juvenile thoughts escalated to isolated, trivial, and calamitous incidents. What took place on distant adolescent thresholds was nothing glamorous. A dark globe of self abuse and indulgence. Frail skeletal infrastructures that ache along with frigid weather climates. In bleak solitude; dismal and naive. A treacherous Calvary of naive fortitude. Put everything away. Lie the past down next to coiled cotton blankets; piled upon sullen soiled bedsheets. A friend and I found a gunshot holed mattress leaning up against the apartment building dumpster. I helped him move it in to our fourth-story haven of supermarket garbage bags and cigarette ends. Cockroaches and filthy maggot dishes. He was the lonesome degenerate poster-child of generation X. A two-fisting bum. I sometimes wonder what  happened to that guy? I'm sure he probably perishes somewhere along the unmistakable boundary lines of skid row and vacant county city project slum lines.
             
                      I remain more aware now of the possibility; sometimes bad things can happen in Winter