Failed Love Poem.

        The wildest love I ever knew,
        Was waking up right next to you
were the first lines to a poem I began, but never completed.
After that, I couldn’t think of any more that hit true.
How to say that love was real and I had found it,
surprised myself
to learn what it was,
how it tasted, those mornings,
like fear,
because for the first time you had something to lose,
something precious,
and knew you would lose it, definitely, eventually,
and everything else, too,
and so had to fight the instinct to clutch it all
so closely,
awkwardly, pathetically, wretchedly—like some kind of beggar.

After that couplet, out came only so much unclever sing-song:
all of my fears / over the years
was one bad try. Perhaps to say more
would have been to box up
that which was meant rather
to always suffuse,
or something … see? Trying to speak the beauty of my love
to my love, the poem sputtered
and died, sputtered and died, as if
I were lying there with her still,
tongue-tied, apologizing—had I hurt her? had I done something bad?
Feeling for a cheap solution, calk, fixative, ignominious petty phrases,
words from the lips of a cheater, betrayer
        when all that I can think to say
        is darling don’t let go today