Stories Ourselves (revised)

Don’t touch me

I’m too cold to feel it

Tell me stories instead

Tell me about the frigid winters

How only the luckiest, the most blessed, survive the snows

Return buried in furs, laden with riches

Tell me about traversing deserts

Scorching sun, long treks to reach strange destinations

And win the hand of a princess, or become a rippling mirage

Tell me about the gods

Their dreams

Their downfalls

Their deceptions and their punishments

How in every mythos, the world is destroyed

The sun is swallowed, darkness descends

And then all is reborn, phoenix-like, from the ashes

Life begins again

Tell me about the afterlife

Weigh your heart against a feather

Look no one in the eye

Sometimes it is frigid, sometimes it burns, and sometimes

Death is nothing

An absence

Tell me anything, just distract me, until we are both too cold to think

And we become stories ourselves

To be told on cold nights, when hands and hearts are numb