Being an impulsive emotionalist,
I believed a sense of longing
or the warmth felt seeing
someone meant I was deeply
in love with them. I refused
to buy the adage that
insisted that love is a verb.
After all, I felt so strongly
and passionately, and rivers
of emotion expressed themselves
through lines of poetry. Duty means
nothing, I said. After all, didn’t it
translate into a cold love that
founded itself on work,
drudgery and self-sacrifice?
Wasn’t something so pure
and special only
meant to be felt
by the soul? Hopelessly
deluded, and quixotic, I
didn’t realise that I’d based
all my convictions on lies,
self-serving delusions that made
me complacent and never work
on myself. The poet might have
improved, but the person deteriorated,
slipping slowly into an abyss where
words and rhymes became
everything, replacing the aubade
and the evensong. Now stripped
of feeling and forced to confront
reality, I aim to work for love,
to render it something substantial
and not a whisper that speaks
of the sweetest things, but
fades as soon as it arrives.
Ordinary Person 
Leave a Reply