Love Poem: You Did It, Now Undid It
Clifford Chapman Avatar
Written by: Clifford Chapman

You Did It, Now Undid It

The moving finger writes and having writ
moves on. And that's the bitter core of it.

So did you scheme to mold we are so base,
like you're disgusted in the human race?

And was it the mirror that then charged through
as you sought an image to seem you true,

even as your treacherous fangs and claws,
blue eyes turned on me their syphilitic pores,

with your sharp knives into my back plunged deep,
say crux designed to make us always weep?

Because to use another's innocence
while feigning love, is to be out of sense.

But, no, compassion should not feature here,
not in the perfidious midst of fear.

Nor where humanity fast disappears
into graveyards drowned in crocodile tears.

The lipstick and the liner once applied,
the reality's safely locked inside

that mirror's terrible irony oh;
you seem pretty, out to the world you go,

where truths and lies and lies and truths do spin
a tangled web to haply live within.

Free choice for you to make, less you're in chains
when swings and roundabouts are all one gains.

Can an adult be steeped in mental blood
crying nature unleashed a toxic flood?

There white becomes black and black becomes white
and your language use makes all appear right.

Yet that line once crossed, that deed, once it's done,
might quickly return to haunt anyone.

Thus soon mind and body together merged
and suppuration swift malignant surged.

Thoughtless present became a nightmare past,
the future, death, a sort of peace at last.

To think a person is so forsaken
simply from just one small step they'd taken?

For a literal thing's so easy to do,
it's the hell thereafter that defines you.

Gaze into that mirror with all your might,
you'll never wipe what looks back from your sight.

Not ever could your thoughts erase such things
when pain and torment's all the morrow brings.

A person's dignity sprite far away,
one could collapse to heaven and nigh pray.

Your fingers reached out to knock at that door,
an act that one day had you crawl on floor,

wailing and howling in foetal display - 
nothing can magic that picture away.

All for a moment's egotistic feed,
heart, mind, body, wiped out by basest need.

So you destroyed yourself; and nearly me.
Go to that mirror again at what you see.

Now as you stare with both feet in the grave,
what price love that can human beings save?

Another betrayal on history's paged,
thus promptly came cancer, as if outraged.

Subconscious wouldn't let the conscious rest,
as truth in the mind unbearable pressed.