Young, trim and cute
Setting all reason on mute
Forever twenty-one
I thought she was the one.
Yet lost in trauma
Oh Mama!
Slipped away
Through my fingers one day.
Day she was lost
My friend crucified on cancer’s cross
Wheeled out on gurney entire
Consigned to death and fire.
The keening widow
Grief bubbling from below
My friends ashen, prayers rote
Certitude up in smoke.
Broke up the same day
Didn’t let her have her say
Now knowing the cost I’d pay
Was she the one that got away?
Many others since
As my heart sought to evince
True love
Redemption sired below, not above.
A bit did I tarry
But I found her and married
House followed dogs and baby
I met the right lady.
But would’ve, could’ve
Maybes’ and should’ves
Always a battle
As the mind tattles.
Mourning love shorn
Possibilities unborn.
A better happiness, maybe?
More, more, unsatisfied, greedy.
Look forward, not back they say
Hand to the plough all the way
Easy to say
Much harder to obey.
Might’ves craft multiverses
Lefts instead of rights, curses
Sifting through memory’s purse
Regret’s teat on which we nurse.
Replacing what you have
Forgoing extant salves
Missing what’s in front of you
Here and true.
I suppose that’s human
Nostalgia’s a tricky lumen
But our haves’ hurt are they
When what if’s hold sway.
Wisdom! Pay attention!
There’s no future or past
Only the now worth mention
Cleaving remorse’s sickly cast.
Soulmates a fiction
Never’s there but one in a million
Legion, legion are they
Who can take your breath away.
Settle on one you must
Offering soft fleshed trust
Intimacies dancing, passion’s play.
Then, betwixt at end of the day,
As the boughs outside sway
Heart and mind not astray
You realize there was never one
That got away.
