by Adrian Fry

Artwork by Marcia Borell

Happiness? I've had that, it was awful,

An emotion as thin as a looking-glass smile.

Yet even now, from this twice shy vantage,

Its sweet and shallow brightness still beguiles,

Making me ignore the truth experience made plain;

Like the sun's laughing dazzle on the freezing lake

Happiness is the spice life adds to pain.

Don't believe me? Look around you, please

And tell me it's happiness that haunts the eyes

Of loners, lodgers, lovers and others

Whose hopes of it once led them to try

Their pin-stickers luck on that abstract stuff,

Keeping them dreaming that things might improve

When they won't. Life's tough.

But you're right, we can't squander time sitting

Wrist-slittingly grim in the gloom laden dark.

Thin ice may be thin, but it's ice for all that,

So it's off to the quiet of the locked midnight park

To skate on the lake 'til the cracks drag us down

To the depths where the deepest of feelings will freeze

And we'll finally, smilingly drown.