I was once a boy who believed in words dipped in magic Carefully coated with sugar From a distance, they shimmered whispered fog in its wake surgically dipped into your heart at hummingbird speed these sweet tender words were easy to swallow however leaves a burning hole in your chest once it finds shelter in your body. Even though your lips produced sweet words I could never get the sour taste out of my mouth The most you could have done was give me something to wash it down with: the leftover tears in Samantha Thompson’s eyes above Wedgefield’s polluted night sky somewhere in the middle of an empty field inside his pickup truck between the words I’m and Sorry the cleanest and most deceitful of them all I doubted every word. I never cared much for the empty spaces between the lines of college-ruled paper They are only meant to be filled with even emptier phrases If I could, I wouldn’t fill in any spaces in the time we were together It would only make our story much more incredulous Adding more would make us less real. Two hearts in love need no words but in reality, you did most of the talking The ***** blanket of faith is a cocoon of words shared only between you and him. We, however, were alien to this Earth We dissolved amongst the shadows of light produced from lampposts, only to be thrown back into the light whether or not you wanted to show me who you really were You always fancied yourself in artificial lighting compared to natural lighting Fearing the natural light would show the colors you only kept to yourself. Lovebug ran to each light as quickly as he could for these lampposts can only cover so much of the unknown We’ll be together forever He ran to each one until he was alone Until he couldn’t find himself Each shadow that was passed before can be seen, traced however his new reflection is indiscernible You can try your hardest to look into dry puddles only to find something that is not so concrete. The only words worth believing in are the ones that are burnt slowly afterward Entre deux coeurs qui s’aiment, nul besoin de paroles. But no matter how much the lampposts grow taller, or how the spaces between ruled-paper continue to dance, the word love will always be the easiest word to swallow but the hardest to digest once it rots in the thick of your stomach.
Alright, so for this poem my professor handed us a numbered outline that described what each sort of verse or couplet should contain. It looked a bit like:
1. Must contain a metaphor
2. Write a line that seems impossible
3. Write a line for each of the five senses
and so on, and so forth.
This poem handles with the way we swallow/hear words and how people and time seem to change it. It stems a lot from my other piece The Definition of Us, but this piece is much more… bitter.
I wish I could have gotten the complete listing of the poem structure, but these poems are called “Just Let It Go” poems, where it’s not so much the content is theme, but just letting go and just writing something off the top of your head is the main reason why as to why these poems are written the way they are.