Beastie

Creeping through its darkened rooms:
Creamy doors and forest-archways.

Washed, but unshaven, glowing skin in the black, on the windows.
Red wine and tobacco pass between lips,
As bare feet pass over cold flag-stones
From a brazen kitchen of flashing terra-cotta
Into it's depths... - a beast with a warm heart,
Hibernating in winter.

Sly drafts blow up blackened flights of stairs.
Up,
Up,
Up to the attic,
Past a broken trap-door
And up,
Up,
Out of the slumbering animal it gives life to.
Meeting with the evening air, it goes
Howling round the dusty orb of murky gold,
The heavy floating mass that is the moon
(As it slides silently and endlessly over silhouetted tree-tops.)

With the house too,
Shelves and cupboards
Bend silently under the weight
Of faded volumes and
Antiques.

Majestic paintings haunt long, frozen walls
And empty stairwells with bodies
And eyes that move with you
Along carpeted spaces.
And all the while,
Childish, abstract pieces bring balance to the eerie vacuum,
Rippling mirth out onto worn down furniture,
Even in Winter's shadowy grasp.

Single-glazed sash-windows fight off the frost from inside.
leafy figures cross the lawn outside,
As earthy rooms' sides
Reach out for other continents through wooden toys and tokens and candlesticks.

Cellas hide copper pans,
Hung like corpses from the noose, hours before dawn.
Shrouded in the sparse, misty breath of spider's webbing - clogging the beast's underbelly.

This building, this beast, is inhabited. - a gnarly group (not without their differences) reside within.
They endure the unwanted presence of Nature's iron grip,
For they know the beast annually disappears, -
Slinking off with sleep eyes
Beneath the feet of giant pines beginning to warm
In some musky woods.

Suspended in each icy room,
The hazy memory of glorious days gone by
Patiently wait to drive all the sharp drafts
Up-
Out of the cella - taking the cob-webs with them,
Through the hallway past gloomy artwork, on
Up,
Up through the cracks in the roof-hatch,
Sending them scuttling after the Wintery Beast
Like impudent schoolboys late for a field-day.

Behind is left a solitary air of radiating calm,
Which fuses merrily with the walls,
Reflecting the aspiring credo of one or two of the inhabitants...
But for now, the beast lies in rest.
Appearing for another year, only moments ago.