I believed in a love.
If it’s a love, then it can’t die, or it isn’t a love.
If it’s a love, then it’s going to exist forever.
So I believed it couldn’t die.
I believed it would exist forever,
Always be there to comfort me, convince me that the world’s
Not lost yet.
But it took a wrong path.
Not a blind alley. A valley
with sides it couldn’t scale. A trench
full of suffocating black oblivion.
A dungeon canyon stretching forever.
Its aimed screams were lost
then quelled
And it died a slow, ugly death.
It tore itself apart.
I watched too closely and the cold wind touched me.
I got too near and the fetid stink drenched me.
I couldn’t run,
I couldn’t leave it,
In my desperate hope that it might recover
I knew it couldn’t.
Now I know that, since it died,
It wasn’t a love.
It wasn’t! Though I’d believed so fervently
And my grief is for it and the world
Because it wasn’t a love, just a
temporary affection.
This grief is worse, a million times more tearing,
Than my grief for its death.