Poetry and Love

I never meant to write about you,

But every blank page begged your name.

The ink had a way of knowing my heart,

Even when my voice couldn’t do the same.

You were the sigh between my sentences,

The silence between my rhyming lines.

Not quite a verse, not quite a word,

But always somewhere in the spine.

Before I called it poetry, I called it confusion—

Why your laugh echoed in morning rain,

Why your absence made the sun feel heavy,

And smiles sting a little like pain.

I thought love was louder—grand, exploding,

Like fireworks and first kisses in July.

But you arrived in metaphors and pauses,

And I didn't realize I was writing “goodbye.”

You were never a poem I chose to write,

You were the one that wrote itself through me.

I’d scribble lists and lullabies,

But your shadow crept in unconsciously.

The pen stuttered when I wrote “forever,”

Like even the ink knew it couldn’t be.

I revised you out, line after line,

But still, the poem felt incomplete.

There were verses I never dared to say,

Things my voice didn’t trust itself to confess—

That your smile lit rooms I didn’t walk into,

And your absence dressed itself in stress.

Some feelings don’t make it to daylight,

Some don’t sound right when said out loud.

So I buried them deep between syllables,

Let them breathe only beneath metaphor’s shroud.

I spoke of oceans and twilight skies,

But I meant your eyes and your indecision.

I wrote of moons in their fading glow,

But I meant my hope and its slow division.

They say real poets bleed through their ink,

That writing’s a way to let the soul be seen.

If that’s true, then I’ve been spilling

Every part of you I kept in between.

You were in the trembling hand that wrote,

In the comma where I paused too long.

In every piece I never published,

Because the feeling still felt wrong.

I hid you in haikus and in free verse,

In unfinished stanzas and broken rhyme.

You were the ellipses I couldn't explain,

Trailing off... in the middle of time.

My poetry didn’t need your name,

You lived in the rhythm, not the phrase.

You were every inhale between heartbreak,

Every echo that time couldn't erase.

You were the "almost" I kept rewriting,

The chapter that wouldn't quite end.

You weren’t just the muse—I was the canvas,

And your love was the invisible pen.

How strange that I loved you in metaphors,

More clearly than I ever could in speech.

That I found my truth in fiction’s frame,

In places real hands couldn’t reach.

Some people are poems in human skin,

Unread by those they were written for.

You were a language I almost understood,

But lost the moment I asked for more.

Now I write not to remember you—

But to free the parts I hid so deep.

To tell myself that love, even unsaid,

Can still be honest, even if it weeps.

Because sometimes the deepest love

Isn’t the one that blooms with ease,

But the one that slips through fingers

And still lingers in every breeze.

So here I write—again, again—

Words I once feared were mine to feel.

Not because you’ll ever read them,

But because this poem makes it real.