Is it worth it?
The pain you caused?
The hurt you brought?
The damage you wrought?
The heart you broke
The soul you destroyed
The love you lost
When you said
“Sorry… Goodbye”
You saved the letters I wrote
The rough prose and youthful hand an unfamiliar receptacle for familiar feelings
I found them in your dresser drawer
The one place truly yours in a life totally shared
I had never opened it
Not in all the years since we moved in together
Not through the highs and the lows of decades together
Not even those final hard years of sickness
I thought about keeping them
A memory of how I felt
The love that makes what I have to do the hardest thing I ever did
But I don’t need to
My love for you is the only thing still bright as the rest of me fades
I instead have decided to place them with you
In the casket
As you take your final rest
For those letters
Like my heart
Are for now and forever
For you
Recently I awoke,
As I always do,
You beside me
Wrapped in sheets,
Your natural state,
Enjoying the silence,
No words spoken,
Only a hug, a soft kiss,
Nothing else needed
To celebrate the passing
Four years together
With you, the love of my life.
Sticks and stones may break my bones
But words they too may hurt me
Sticks’ loud crack can smart you ears
But words leaves silence deeply
Stones bring bruises blue and black
Words bring but a tear
But bruises soon fade from the fore
While words keep deepest fear
Sticks and stones will ache my bones
When I bathe they drift away
But words can cut into my heart
And down in there they’ll stay
Sticks and stones can kill outright
As the body curls to break
Yet words may work a slower pace
And move your soul to take
Neither sticks nor stones can truly hurt
The strength that lies inside
But words can niggle at its core
Find it where it may hide
Sticks and stones may break my bones
But words do greater still
The first may break my body
The next my soul will kill
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Written for Grammar Ghoul Press’ mutant 750 challenge # 36.
Sway me with verse
With rhymes and words
With raw passion
With the strength of emotion
Use the almighty pen
Sealing thoughts in jet-black ink
Safe from memory’s vagrancies
Free to roam around the world
Use voice
Bring the words to life
Syllables in machine gun rapidity
Explosions of verbiage
Bring me poetry
Wondrous, magnificent poetry
Every which way you can
Show me what words can do
In out, in out
Fill lungs with the good
Release the bad
Send it out into the aether
To the vastness of the world outside
Where it can disperse
Fade into nothingness
So the soul
Malleable beyond words
Infinitely Changeable
Adaptable
Can once again soar
Be everything it can be
Written for Grammar Ghoul Challenge number 27
Break it down for me
The game we call love
Down to its essence
Its tiniest particles
#
Start simply
Note the soft kisses at the start of a long day
Record the passion brought at midnight
Measure the sweet words under bated breath
#
Look closer
Titrate the rush of the first kiss against life’s long minute
Image the fights and the make-up
Analyse the break-ups and the new possibilities that come after
#
See the entirety
See the passion and the heartbreak
See the beginning and the end
See it all
#
Break it down for me
The highs, the lows, the good, the bad
Show me what I know
To play the game is always to win
He could’ve had a father
The guy was a descent sort
Would have been kind
But sometimes romance does not kick off
And his old man had walked out the door
Long before he first kicked in the womb
He could’ve been a rocket scientist
He was bright, all the teachers could see it
His mind burned bright behind the eyes
But school was for idiots
You can make a fortune sitting on a street
With a swig of the bottle to take away the cold
He could’ve been a daddy
It would have turned his life around
To see a part of himself looking back at him
But the bottle’s siren song
Was stronger than the pull of the heart
And love’s promise died on the vine
He could’ve lived
He could have thrived
He could have made his mark in the world
But the poison had rotted his mind
Making him numb to cold’s harsh dagger
In a doorway the world would not see
Walk with me
Through these hallowed halls
Filled with history
Ghosts of men long gone
Filled with tales of forbidden love
Of the great torment of genius
Of culture’s great clash
Come with me my friend
Let me be your guide
As I tell you tales
The stories in these walls
You are distant now
Past forests and seas
Past clouds and the mountains that pierce them
Across the very world
Our separation is vast
Almost beyond comprehension
The width of the world between us
Keeping you from my arms
But I weep not
Because though the world keeps us apart
With a barrier of distance
We are still together
Together in our minds
Together in our hearts
And not even the distance of the world
Can keep my love from you
joe2poetry 