I wrote a poem with your name,
And left a lot of blanks along the way:
Subtle mannerisms meant to render delicate and absolute imagery
Drifted right out of my vocabulary,
Face to face with the other component of a lover's metaphor:
The churning azure of the ocean's ebb and flow stared hungrily at the limitless white abyss beneath its tidy line in my unfinished sonnet.
I meant to write a poem about you:
Clear and beautiful: the materialization of how love is taught to feel in the classroom,
Where Helen hangs her heavy head and stares into her doomed reflection:
The vacant space that flowers grow, between cobbled steps and naked feet.
Yet, something else has happened:
The space where your imploring image should have inspired stars to fall into the fiery depths of hades hangs indifferently above reality.
All the superfluous images crafted to allow your luminous soul to shine,
Fell flat against the darkness: the aftermath that occurred before I had any time to craft the person behind the syllables of your being.
I meant to paint your image with language synonymous to love,
But instead I pressed my face against the hand-smeared, dust-ridden, cracked open only just an inch, window of a relationship that never really was much of a novel.
The still damp with paint, folded down the middle construction paper butterfly of kindergarten art projects of love. Messy and effortless, yet containing some inevitable beauty that comes from the close and intimate fusion of two halves.
I wanted to eternalize our connection through language,
But in the process, I unraveled it and left myself vulnerable and empty across from what was once the magic I had sought to know,
Now blurred, your name conjures an ink blot that my eyes have grown so accustomed to, they can hardly make out the hidden beauty.
I meant to write a poem with your name,
Yet mine has appeared on every quivering line.
A distorted self portrait of the artist echoed in my vain attempts to personify an emotion not yet felt.
I lost you in the very language that sought to immortalize you, and found myself in the process.
Your name no longer stood for the way your eyes light up when you talk about something of importance,
Or your genuinely lopsided smile and crooked tooth,
But instead, for all of myself that hide behind the capital Y of you:
All my missed opportunities and failures materialized in a poem that wanted so effortlessly to be about Love:
The crime of understanding a person as a metaphor
Echoes soundly through the hollow horizontal lines of words
That, if you squint just so,
Look faintly like the bars on a cage
With your name looming above its pearly gates,
Tragically beautiful yet motionless and with a purpose that has no impact
Beyond the world that it lingers about, yet never really enters.