and she smiles like a twilight sun,
all orange and alive and promising
and fearless in its job to protect.

and when she said i was her hero,
i didn’t know exactly what she meant,
having grown up on comic books and dungeons and dragons,
and in other words, the hero wins.

but i lost this time, lost so much,
so why do i deserve this paradise?
when every other shot i’ve taken left me quaking in a post-adolescent premature drive for tragedy and ‘how much worse can this possibly get?’
a typically typical ethos.

and all without realizing that sometimes
all you have to do is listen to the ocean laughing
to know that everything is going to be fine.