Tag Archives: love

Class Reunion, for dVerse Poets, May 27, 2025

 

Class Reunion

I wish I’d set the truth aside.
I wish instead that I had lied
when you asked the reason why
I didn’t choose the other guy.
I wish I’d said you’d won my heart
quickly, from the very start.

But, alas, I told the truth.
Blame it on my careless youth.
It was, perhaps, naïveté
that made me answer you that way.
I said you were my second choice,
then heard that quaver in your voice.

For all those years forever after,
I’ve recalled your bitter laughter
as you said you guessed you’d wait
for the type of girl who’d rate
you first when making her selection,
and thus began your swift defection.

After all these years, I’ll tell
that I remember very well
regrets I suffered at your leaving—
all those nights of futile grieving.
Watching as you met your wife,
had your kids and built your life.

Every few years at class reunions
as we all share our fond communions,
I’ll catch your eye and feel the spark
that goes unnoticed in the dark.
And every day, until I die,
I’ll wish I’d told that little lie.

for dVerse Poets the prompt is to write a poem about any pivotal moment in your life that left you with gnawing regrets or you could cover the entire gamut from anger to forgiveness and reconciliation. In short, you will be writing about a krisis in your personal life. Image by Viktor Talashuk on Unsplash.

Romantically Retired

Romantically Retired

I think I’ve formerly related
that I’m neither wooed nor dated.
Zero heroes, zero traces
of besotted hearts or faces.

Gamblers better put their money
on the fact I’ll have no honey.
Chances more likely for a win
on the roulette wheel’s random spin.

Fortune tellers’ only visions
are of partings and divisions.
No new meetings, no reunion
that might prompt a future union.

So I guess I’ll go on missing
bouts of geriatric kissing.
And instead of passions new,
fond memories will have to do.

Prompt words today are spin, related, traces, vision, money and zero.

Father/Daughter Discourse

Dear Daughter:

Your frenetic new admirer is not my cup of tea,
for even though I told him that he’d have to let you be,
he resorts to tactics like climbing that big tree
to gain visual access to our property.

You, too, must be incisive in telling him to cease
if you’d like his constant efforts to come to a surcease.
For though I am your father, he allots to me no power

but simply remains stubbornly in his leafy bower.

His persistent efforts prove that he is from that faction
that they label OCD, for he shows no reaction
to my constant pleas, so do you agree with me
that it’s necessary to just cut down the tree?

Dear Papa:

Alas, though my new suitor is not your cup of tea,
I find that his flavor is agreeable to me.
I am not your teenage daughter, for I’m almost thirty-three.
So please do not molest him, and do not cut down his tree.

It is a fact, dear parent, I’m of marriageable age.
So cease with your obsession and curb parental rage.
It’s time to cut the apron strings and set your daughter free,
for I prefer another perch to my father’s knee!

 

Prompt words are frenetic, incisive, faction, allot, and almost.

Coup de Coeur

Coup de Coeur

You have built a tunnel—a channel to my heart.
I should have seen it sooner, should have known it from the start.
Now you foment discord to make me feel unrest.
None of the others calm the storm. I know you are the best.
It is a sort of power. Therefore, I must not fall.
Yet I cannot resist it, for I love you most of all.
I might have wed for power. Now I must wed for love.
How can I rule somebody who fits me like a glove?
My friends find it hilarious I’ve let my defense down

to substitute a bridal veil for my royal crown.
I guess I’ll have to settle for a democracy
now that you have staged a coup on my monarchy.

Prompt words today are tunnel, therefore, hilarious, channel and foment.

Shoe-in

Shoe-in

Love is not contractual. It is not trite or buyable.
It’s not dependent on reason to render it as viable.
It depends on qualities more visceral than seeable—
makes one’s considerations more  youable than meeable.

In its beginning stages, love may seem aleatory
as though the price of love is to squirm in purgatory.
Waiting by the telephone, in an abject state,
love wonders, “Will or won’t he ask me for a date?”

But this abject terror sometimes gives way to calm
as our object of affection furnishes the balm
that soothes our rash and fearful hopes and turns them to reality,
refining hopeful crushes into mutual love’s  finality.

True love is always waiting to drop the other shoe
as “Will he? Will she? Dare we?” finally gives way to “I do.”

Word prompts for the day are visceral, trite, aleatory and abject.

Hearth

Hearth

That vacant place in my heart.
That pool missing from the ocean.

If the purpose of life
is to live it,
why all the fuss and bother?
Why the wars and thievery?
Why the empty heart?
Is it the law of supply and demand?
Peace more treasured when a rarity?
Love more precious surrounded by hate?
Let us make a little cave here in this place
where no one else wants to be.
Let us take pleasure and do no harm.
Let us fill up the oceans of our hearts
and pray that the world with all its problems
keeps its distance.

Prompts for today are vacant, live, ocean, purpose and pool.

Hearts Adrift

flying-heart

Hearts Adrift

You’ve piqued my curiosity, riled up my blood.
Brand new possibilities surge in like a flood.
Sages say enchantment is magic of a kind
that brings down your defenses and permeates your mind
with fantastic possibilities that make it fully probable
that heavy hearts inflate until they are light and bobbable.

See them on the tide line, floating all about—
free of any tether and free of any doubt.
A sea of love ‘s an image once rendered in a song
that catches in our hearts and makes them sing along.
They form a soft accompaniment to the real world’s roar
that’s telling us we’re not the type a lover would adore.

But you’ll find that hearts may come in many makes and guises,
and when you set your heart adrift, it just may yield surprises.

 

The prompt words today were sage, pique, enchantment and blood.

https://ragtagcommunity.wordpress.com/2019/02/10/rdp-sunday-sage/
https://fivedotoh.com/2019/02/10/fowc-with-fandango-pique/
https://onedailyprompt.wordpress.com/2019/02/10/your-daily-word-prompt-enchantment-february-10-2019/
https://wordofthedaychallenge.wordpress.com/2019/02/10/blood/

Love Lesson #1

Love Lesson #1

Passion leads to true love’s casting,
but liking is more everlasting.

Mature Love

DSCN1300

 

Mature Love

I once basked in your bonfire, and though no one quite remembers
when we last caught fire, I’m warming fingers at your embers.
Slow steady fires that survive, snoozing ‘neath the ashes
have the same mysterious lure as winks obscured by lashes.
Passion need not flame to warm the cockles of one’s heart.
What was a wild onslaught at its very start
may settle down to a warm glow or a steady smolder.
Loving hand placed over hand —my head upon your shoulder.

 

 

DSCN1301

 

https://ragtagcommunity.wordpress.com/2018/11/03/rdp-saturday-bask/
FOWC with Fandango — Snooze
https://wordofthedaychallenge.wordpress.com/2018/11/03/bonfire/
https://dailyaddictions542855004.wordpress.com/2018/10/27/daily-addictions-2018-week-43/onslaught

Torn Love

Torn Love

Still standing close,
each on our own side of this terrible rending,
how can we see things so differently?
This little flap of skin
you keep pulling open
wants to close.

This is how cancers start—
this worrying and worrying of an old injury.
My darling. Leave it alone
and let us heal.
This is only a biopsy
of our changed love affair.

If it is cut out of us,
it will be by your decision;
and no number of late-night arguments
will ever change that fact.
What you need to remember
the next morning,
you will remember.

If it were up to me,
we would still be friends,
but if you need an enemy
to console you in your actions,
I guess I must be that too.
I always was a figment
of your imagination.
Believe that
if it makes this easier for you.

II

Cicatrix

I know better than you
what lies buried under
my healed-over self.

The raised part of me
grown to protect the wound
creates this distance
that I once warned you of.

I need to thicken that part of me
where part of you remains,
and if for this time you gasp for air,
it is my thick skin growing over you,
like an orb spider winding you in my web

until you become
the one in me hidden so deep
that even you
believe you’ve disappeared.

 

Yes, another reprint of a poem from over four years ago. The prompt today was torn.