Love's Last Wound
Friends?
Are we still friends?
Can we JUST be friends?!?
Oh such a horrid, charity-stained question!
What a keen and salient dagger it wields!
The pity that you wear like black lace finery,
Is as deadly and whetted a sword as any raised in battle ...
The patronizing look in your eyes presses on its hilt
With the agonizing weight of feigned cordiality,
To pierce the tender flesh of my hopes,
Deep and quick and precise.
Why ... why this last dose of bitter passion??
To ease your careless conscience?
All you've done is make the blade more jagged,
The wound more brutal and raw.
Now here I lay ...
Exhausted in spirit and sinews,
By what I now realize was lovemaking for clemency's sake ...
One last, tender moment to minimize the blow.
Shards of moonlight through the louvers,
Lay like broken pieces of porcelain on furrowed bedclothes,
As my passions bleed out at your feet,
Draining my heart of the realities
Of what I thought we had ...
What might have been, beyond friendship.
My love for you collects in a puddle of one-sided regrets,
And now this dreadful question makes all a travesty,
A mocking, cruel, pitiful farce ...
No, my love, I can NEVER be just ... your friend.
~ 1st Place ~ in the "My Friend, My Love" Poetry Contest, Julie Leigh Rodeheaver, Judge & Sponsor.
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