Funny how these things happen, no?

“Yours is Wilting Before Me”
Poetry by WIMR

Beautiful, if beyond the stone that is me,
are these sentences you drop, as if they
are coals blazing in your mouth,
and you savor the burns.
First-degree? Second? Nay,
third, for you are enraptured,
in school-boy earnest to pluck my heart-strings
as I inadvertently pluck yours.

Were it that I meant to be your musician,
we would be Siamese twins of the heart,
but I tripped over your harp,
didn’t mean to pick it up and play—-
we were born of different mothers
and never shared a womb after all.

I hate this, this coldness, this granite
that is my heart; I try, you try
to break it open, but our hammers only
bounce around the surface,
chipping but nothing more! I can’t be taken
in one fell swoop,
like Washington’s tree,
like everybody else can-—Why?

The ghouls I see now tangoing in
the inkwells of your eyes: writing agony
in the essay of your life
in a section that shall be in my handwriting,
with no way for me to erase it! Some girls
treat breaking hearts as plucking
flowers—-the withering things look well
on the dining room table, and, later, forgotten
in a flower press on a dusty shelf.

But you are no daisy; you are the finest rose
I could never come to love,
all silky but blackening petals,
over which I drip tears of my own,
for having led you, though never
on purpose, to believe that I could
be your sunshine
and your rain
and your love.

Copyright WritingIsMyReligion 2006