Little kids wailing, red-faced and swollen,
Snow and ice casting their wicked leers across the landscape—
A frozen tundra, a cascade of luminous joy and sorrow, soon to be benighted
with ignorance, frivolity, and fatuity. There is no North, the grey-beard quipped scornfully,
mourning the death of his late wife, his only confidant, the death of innocence.
We die this death slowly or rapidly. (The speed contingent on curious sentiments.)
Where is the man who will gallantly lead us to victory?
Where is the little child, who will lead us home?

Snow spangled across the sky, now, emblazoned in crystals of hope and longing.
Only the dead ones shall inherent the earth, for they shall lead the blind.
Pleasure and folly; cupidity and wantonness, the earth is engorged with her toys.
A surfeited hodgepodge, of insipidity, inanity, and banality. 
Benumbed to feeling except that which elicits chaos or pleasure;
Insouciance in the face of evil, our modus operandi.
Violence: our lingua franca

Inveterate pride is as impenetrable as ice,
Smooth and shiny, it offers little resistance
To children, with wool scarves and mittens, as they glide effortlessly,
Naively across the frozen pond in skates of leather and steel—
Night, always nigh, every present, invariably looming;
Auguring constricting, suffocating prophecies as penultimate tidings to men.
As dusk approaches, these portents are blithely shrugged off with sacramental formulas:
“What’s it matter to me?”; “Who cares?”; Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die.
The poisonous intoxication of hedonism and craven disregard.
Fecklessness births apathy—apathy engenders nihilism.
Inexorable and fatal and vice versa.

Ecce Homo—Behold the Man!
What is man? What is a gentleman?
Somnambulistic questions percolated
As I skated by a small child, no older than seven
And picked up her mitten. 
“I believe this is yours...young lady”
I smiled ruefully as I outstretched my arm.
Yet she—with the innocence of a babe
And the voraciousness of a monster—
Stared at me blankly
In consternation and disgust.