The poem i didn't know how to start

By Alycia hibbert

 

Putting love to paper is easy for some.

But I am no Shakespeare, no shelly, no Blake – no Edgar Allan Poe.

I have always been more comfortable writing when my pen is prompted by pain.

I have always been a Plath, Gogh, and Woolf kind of girl.

The girl that spills tears on messy handwriting, for messy feelings.

I do not know how to use a formulated structure -  

How to write in sonnets and iambs,

I do not know how to compare anyone to a summer’s day.

Summer days have always been rare to me.

Storms have always been my weather of choice…

Love has always felt so out of grasp.

But here I am trying to grasp it,

To come up with some metaphor or personification or rhyme.

But nothing will be sufficient enough to describe this experience.

This so very foreign experience.

Here I am rambling about something so out of reach -

But, regardless, incredibly clear that it is love.

But my fear outweighs the prospect, my trauma prevents a pursuit.

Loving a tortured artist is challenging,

I know because I once was one.

My poetry proved it; my art verified it.

And although I struggle still to find stability, to accept love fully

I am no longer tortured in the way I was.

However, here you stand in your arduous condition

Tortured... and troubled.

We share trauma that makes me recognize this.

But here I am lying to myself, pretending I don’t know how to write about love.

I know how to personify weather, how to describe fear, rejection, and the trauma of heartbreak.

 

But I do not know how to articulate the beauty in the suffering,

I find you so incredibly beautiful… but abhor your pain.

So I don’t know how to start this poem, to have those words co-exist.

And I wish it were different,

that I would know how to co-exist in the middle of your chaos.

That you wouldn’t disappear whenever you feel hurt.

Missing in action is the game you like to play.

Whenever you get closer to me you turn to run away

and each time you hide the less I want to seek.

It’s a battle to get answers of if you’re okay.

I spent to much time being at war with myself to enlist in yours.

And it's so very painful to write those words,

I’ve become accustomed to writing about bullets and cries –

But I do not want to write like that for you.

I am no Shakespeare, no shelly, no Blake – no Edgar Allan Poe.

But I wanted to write sonnets in your honour,

To write you odes and letters and dedications before my novels …

But.

I cannot chase that idea anymore.

The idea of love letters and spoken word poetry.

I cannot let you go, But I can let us go.

The idea of us that may have existed in an alternative world,

A world where I didn’t fear loving someone so alike to me,

A world where you weren’t so scared to be loved at all.

The literature and words we may have written by being mutual muses.

In this lifetime you are my greatest love, my closest friend

But not my lover, not my muse.

This is yet another poem written messily with hands and thoughts…

Incoherent and incomplete.

I’m still just a water girl following in the footprints of Plath and Woolf.

And you are simply another storm,

And storms have always been my weather of choice.

I didn’t know how to start this poem, but I am not surprised at how it ended…

It didn’t end in a sonnet, in a beautiful ode.

You may have been a summers day in a different world.

But you aren’t in this one