i stood outside the fortune teller's tonight
waiting for the bus
ocean smells and
neon candles,
and me
bound and beautiful
thinking i should have walked
caught enough to know that sometimes it's fine to stay and wait
i wrote this all before you came
before it all changed
take it away, i never had it anyway
a tribute,
a reminder,
on this day of all days.
a warning about regret
"And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth."
- Raymond Carver, "Last Fragment," *All of Us: The Collected Poems*
