Search

The Love We Never Had
(These Words for Chickabee)

These are the words I wrote last week
While you were immersed in obligations and duties.
Our discontentment in life cleaved us together
Although you know only part of our journey.
To live for the moment, create our safe place of bliss
We thought would satiate our souls.
To have you for a sliver of life to eclipse reality,
If only for a blink or a heartbeat.

These are the words I wrote last week
To keep you, then shed you off in our past.
To be the one to call you lover and love maker,
To make you precious and then common again.
To remake you so the memory shimmers
As light on the water or fire in the hearth.
To reject you incompletely in your epiphany,
But welcome you back in your paradox of contentment.

These are the words I wrote last week,
To carve you forever and indelibly upon my heart.
For you resemble an ethereal mist
Moving upon the darkness and light of human essence.
A portrait with background and colors, the brush strokes
At another's whim and desire but not of your own.
Wounds forced deeply within you, hidden away in darkness
While you heap gladness and joy over them.

These are the words that attempt forgiveness in light of trespass
But remain unspoken in fear of a revelation
That would surely extinguish the hope and presence still enjoyed.
Of love one-sided and unbalanced and received with guilt and shame,
Admitting distrust and infidelity but asking for absolution.
Knowing the darkness and evil of the lie and aching for purity of warm light
That is now unattainable and disgraced
And beyond the grasp of soiled hands and a tarnished soul.

These words are about passion relinquished but muted
By the tangle of uncertainty, guilt, and fidelity.
How love is defined by the absence of uncertain words,
More surely composed of delicate thoughts and gentle actions
Routing out truth where it was supplanted for selfish gain.
Love is without intention or expectation, freely offered
And without obligation upon whom it is bestowed.
These are the words I wrote last week.