Submit your work, meet writers and drop the ads. Become a member
Sep 2015
If only you knew
The poems I wrote about you
Every gaze left unrequited
Every time you rustled the leaves in this garden
And I had to turn myself invisible
Because I could not let myself love you
Because I knew you'd never love me back
Not in the way I wanted you to

Fall comes and I hurt
Sights of couples stacked on benches in parks
Even the leaves collide more consciously than ever
But here I am still
Pinning for a touch

Here I am sitting in your car
Watching the windscreen wipers go left and right on this rainy Sunday afternoon
If only you knew
How oppugnant my mind was too

Even the trees dance
Even the trees dance?
Even the trees dance!
I warned myself not to get into this trance
Even on the nights you wrap your arm around my shoulder when I'm hardly myself I know
Nothing warm is gold
And it will not stay

Even when you brought me away from the fangs of the safari
Even on the dusks you've saved me I know
All you do is tie
And cut
And tie
And cut
Our strings
And how well I played the fool to all your tricks

But you will never know
You will never know
Like the tattoos on your back that you will never read
Like the airs I feign that you will never breathe
Because you will never
See the way I look at you
When you turn the other cheek
With your eyes on someone else

I wish I was different so that you could learn to love me

Just words hanging in the air now
A comical portrait of self-destruction when I look back at the words I've written
So necessary
Fringing on insanity
Harping on a monster without wings

Still I had the last laugh when I
Played the fool to play you now these
Scratch marks mar the charms of your tattoos

But you'll never see them just as how you'll never see the ink I bled for you
I decided to name this one '(Unretitled)' because it suggests that the writer tried to retitle it, but thereafter decided against it. Much like the subject matter of the poem being about a sense of unrequited/unreciprocated love and the dilemma of struggling to tear oneself away from it.
Raphael Cheong
Written by
Raphael Cheong
Please log in to view and add comments on poems