Frayed and grayed
Oversized and overused
Why you still hold onto it,
has everyone bemused.

Freckled and speckled
Like a cinnamon stick
warm winter stories
Keeping it thick

Pale fingernails, peak through the sleeves,
Tears and holes decorate the wrists.
From between cupped hands
Rise cinnamon flavored mists

Warm memories ride down your throat
Thawed hearts melt with every sip
Cinnamon specked bubbling froth
Settles above your lip

Cinnamon flavored laughs
Punctuate the conversations
Spicy aroma tickles the nose
Sniffing for winter’s indications

Warm memories on cold nights
Fill up the empty holes in your sleeves
Packed with stories soaked in cinnamon
And the sweater becomes fuller with the memories it weaves

You left me
scattered like cigarettes ashes
and shattered like broken glasses

remember when we were in third grade
and we would make it our goal to trample
every single patch of fresh snow that hadn’t been touched yet?
i don’t even know why we were so determined to touch
the previously untouched,
but it made us feel so happy, so proud, so accomplished.
Perhaps it was our first taste of true ownership,
perhaps it gave us a feeling similar to that of Christopher Columbus when he declared
that the world was not, in fact, flat.
Perhaps it was an embryonic stage of rebellion,
a metaphor for a loss of innocence,
trampling and touching and ruining what was once
a pretty, unadulterated patch of snow,
as if to make a statement against anyone and anything
that had ever made us feel
weak and stupid and insignificant, and
powerless.
We were the only two kids at recess who thought of it, who found such
simple pleasure in doing it, who bonded over it, and now,
we don’t even talk anymore.
Perhaps it was a metaphor
for the deterioration of a friendship, too.