Epic love poem
As long as I have loved you, I’ve felt like a bad person.
It let me keep you at a distance
so that it didn’t cripple in a single act
but, sporadically over a matter of years.
Would it have been smarter to take in one sitting?
I have a lot of these questions that no one can answer,
so I write them here like coins tossed into a well,
hoping they might lift some weight instead of festering in my soul
like a bunch of rusted change that’s stuck to a little bit of everything it’s touched.
You weren’t the love of my life,
but it’s certainly carried on like a counterfeit at times.
There should be a line, a point at which a person can not be hurt more,
like an internal kill switch that could have spared me
the spell of your eyes.
There’s a comparison worth noting
in the coital gaze
and the caution exclaimed when a substance is flammable,
that makes you wish they were both labeled.
You wouldn’t expect being receptive, having been scalded,
but it happens.
I thought there was a patent on the kind of pain
I carry and I wore it like a badge of scars
that would protect me from being further harmed.
I’ve wasted so much of my life, playing dead
as a protective measure in case there was something worse.
I should be used the words like the skin that grows over old wounds.
It looks and feels the same, so no one would guess
that part of you was torn or know better than to rip it back open.
I don’t think there is a way to recover from not being loved,
but there should be a better way to cope.
There should be rules and legislation,
to keep things from getting ugly and so grossly imbalanced.
It’s just not fair that it ends for you
while it lies inside of me like a dead fetus,
so bonded to my organs
it cannot be cut from my womb,
now that it has become part of something
that’s keeping me alive.
We were not star-crossed lovers or likeable characters, destined
but, our story is long and very sad.
Sometimes it helps to make the girl a villain
and maybe you don’t really deserve that, after all,
you’re just another one that didn’t love me back.
