last sips

When every window
in his house gets
darker
in the winter
I watch his poetry become
more and more drunk,

from the liquor
that he writes
"tumbles like love
from her heavy lips"
but he truly pours
just to fill
plastic champagne glasses.

He senses a small amount
of heartbreak in everyone
but he never feels sorry
for them.
He's closed the eyelids of love poems
enough times
to convince himself that
nothing matters enough to cry anymore.
It might just be the empty shot-glasses speaking
but he mumbles to himself
in the back-seats of taxi cabs
"man, I've never felt lonelier
than when I've been in love;
I got enough sorrows drowned
at the bottom of me
that they've started to climb
up each other's backs and reach the surface."

Every day
she comes to his till
sometime between lunch and dinner,
with a thin salad and smile,
reads his name tag and still
only offers a

"hi."
"How are you," he asks.
She's looking down, going through her wallet.
"I'm fine, how about you?"
Well, I haven't slept more than ten minutes
without dreaming of your blonde hair
wrapping up my eyes, turning me blind
so I don't have to shake near you
ever again but just rest in your kisses
like your lips are the last sips of liquor
I will ever have to taste to feel
okay with my life.
"Good," he answers.

And every night he goes
home from work on the night bus
imagining her head
on his shoulder
while he looks out the window
through his reflection of
ash lips and stubble
and into the
dark.
And every night when he
gets lost in his darkness
and dreaming,
he picks up that sticky
deep smell of liquor
coming from nowhere really at all,

and it brings him right back again.