I loved you more than I hated myself

paulSN

Don't speak directly to her--
you will melt the skin  off
  her bone-frame

Instead, find the parallel-words--

ones that will float alongside her
as she walks, so as she is able-
she can pluck them--  like
wild roses along the highway

Sometimes, love takes a
   tremendous
amount of creativity--

the name of the game is
  its destination
not the control of its path

He Feels She Has

He feels,
               she has
a hand worth holding,

he’d call her beautiful,

but he fears
                  but he fears,

she would reject him,

so he says nothing,
            
            and walks away.

James E. Roethlein copyright 2021

They’d waited too long to say

“I love you”.

3 words. 3 syllables.

Yet they held millions of emotions unspoken.

and now that they’d done it, they wouldn’t,
couldn’t, stop

they told each other all the time, at the end of the argument
and before the good news.

In the middle of the storm, even though it was hard to see, and after, when the raging winds had settled on a breeze

before the rising sun turned the sky pretty colors and after it flickered out and faded away into the dark

Underneath the stars that their love had been etched into

There was no love until death for them, because it would never stop

I love you beyond