She said, "I can't swim"
With a voice so confident
The ocean believes
They're still best friends.

Hemingway said,
There is quite the difference
between kissing goodbye
and kissing goodnight.

I wanted a
"See you later",
but instead got the
"Goodbye".

Steinbeck stated that
Nothing good gets away,
If it's right, it happens.

If that's the case
how did we always end up feeling so
wrong?

Salinger suggested
that after falling in love
you never know
where the hell you are.

This, I can say is true.
Where the hell are we?

Dickens declared that
The truest wisdom
comes from a loving heart.

Yet a heart in love
can sometimes turn out to be
the least wise.

My friend, I think I'll just stick with
Orson Welles' theory:
"We're born alone, we live alone, we die alone."

Anything else is simply illusion.

I spent forever searching
for a girl whose lips tasted like Cherry Coke with wisdom
seeping out of her throat as she spoke

Tonight
   got away from the mess
city   toothache     throb
ensemble of car horns
     shoppers throwing     money
like empty   sweet wrappers

park is better
calming me     a cup of cocoa
stepped     into Narnia
     without the wardrobe

snow   squeals   with each step
little deaths
   little graves where others have   stood
a ring of prints from   a hundred   shoes

breathe in     white silence
   find frost’s left a hypothermic   dance
between wires   of a tree
   white fibres together as arms

sweep clean   the bench
   blanket of sherbet
sit and think
how simple it is to be     forgotten
   alone   a caterpillar of tinsel
in a tattered   brown box
not allowed to   shine past
   December thirty-first

or not shine at all
   rather a rope of dud   fairy-lights
   I wonder   I wonder
lamppost emits a   frigid glow
night unfurls above my head
  
   I left my gloves
at home     again