Captive

Why do you stay in prison
when the door is so wide open?
                -Rumi

The weather holds me captive
in the damp, dark basement of this psyche:
steel gray palates cuffed ‘round my ankles,
(my legs in the holes where color should be)
shivering, bare branches beneath my skin,
(they hold up the sky, why not me?)
soot-stained snow camped out
across the dead foliage of my shoulders.
Time moves slower here.
Some days I crouch down,
peer out of the key hole,
wonder how everyone else
does it.