Most love poems announce a love. Susovan's "December~." admits something more awkward and more honest: the speaker is haunted by someone they have never met. "What compels me to have you on my mind?" is the poem's only question, and it goes unanswered. The speaker doesn't understand the pull, only that it keeps returning, first in sleep and then in waking thought. The central idea is that fantasy can offer real comfort while also making plain what is missing from real life.
The poem has two stanzas, and the move between them is its main structural event. The first, four lines long, belongs to the dream: "I dreamed about you last night." A dream is something that happens to us, and the speaker's puzzlement fits that passivity. The second stanza begins "I thought about you last night," and the verb has changed from dreaming to thinking. The speaker is now awake and perhaps half-choosing the image. The stanza is also longer, seven lines against four, as if the feeling spills over once it is let out. The pattern of the repeated opening, with one word altered, quietly shows the obsession deepening.
The details of the dream are sparse. In the first stanza there is only "you and a bottle of wine," an image with a relaxed, grown-up intimacy to it. The second stanza supplies touch and sound: "rubbing my back," "holding me tight," "Whispering in my ear." What the whisper says is never reported. What matters is its effect, "Making me feel safe." That word is the emotional centre of the poem. The speaker doesn't dwell on kisses or passion but on being steadied and held, which suggests that what they miss is reassurance more than romance. That is an inference from the text, but the choice of "safe" over any more dramatic word supports it.
The poem has no regular rhyme scheme, but sound still holds it together. The first stanza is full of long *i* sounds: "night," "wine," "mind," "life." Their echo gives the opening a soft, circling music, like a thought the speaker can't put down. In the second stanza "night" returns and rhymes with "tight," linking the hour of the dream to the grip of the embrace. Later, "safe" and "escape" share their vowel sound in a near-rhyme, so the comfort and its impossibility are bound together in sound as well as sense.
The rhythm is plain and speech-like. The lines are short, mostly end-stopped, with hardly any punctuation, so the poem moves like a confession in a low voice. The pace changes at the end. The last two lines are longer and heavier, and the punctuation grows clumsy: "A daydream I can only have,because" has its comma jammed against the next word, as though the speaker rushes toward the admission before losing nerve. The closing tilde in "sweet escape~" matches the one in the title. It reads as a trailing sigh, a soft wave of the hand rather than a full stop. A mark that casual undercuts the sadness of the sentence it ends, much as people often joke to avoid sounding too wounded.
The last line also contains a small irony. "Reality is not a sweet escape" implies that the daydream is the sweet escape, and that the speaker needs one. The phrase "in real life" in the first stanza hints that this connection lives somewhere other than face-to-face contact, though the poem never says where. The title adds to the pull between warmth and cold. December isn't mentioned in the lines themselves, but a month associated with winter makes the imagined embrace feel like shelter, as I read it.
The poem is significant for its candor and restraint rather than its ambition. It doesn't dress longing up in grand metaphor or pretend the feeling has a happy outcome. The speaker knows the difference between dream and reality and says so in the final lines. Many readers will recognise the experience of missing someone who was never really theirs to miss, and the poem's value lies in saying it simply, without self-pity and without disguise.