The best poem I ever read
Was that little bit of time
When we belonged to each other

And now that we no longer do,
It seems to me
I understand it now
Better than I did before

*********************

Our poem had its faults
That I dared not to see
And the writing went crooked
In places

There were times it went blank
When we needed it most
And we wrote it
On crumpled up pages

And the pencil went dull
It would crumble and snap
We would sharpen it
But it got short way too fast

And it seems that
We couldn’t decide who would write it
Instead of conceding
We wanted to fight it

Our poem went too deep
I don’t think I was ready
For the truth
That we put into words

And if we wrote it down
For the other to read
We regretted it
Once it was heard

Sometimes it got real
And we both felt attacked
We began to unfeel
And began to hold back

We began to pick out
Just how much of ourselves
We could show to the other
How much we would tell

And the next thing we knew
We had run out of lines
There was nothing left
For us to do

And the next thing we knew
We had run out of time
And our love poem
Began to bleed through

And yet, looking back
It’s the best poem I’ve read
And it told me
The things that I needed

And once in a while
I open our book
There’s still love
In our poem when I read it

Once in a while
I dare take that look
There’s still love in our poem
When I read it