My darlings
You became little men
The day we ran from the boogeyman
You met the task as an adventure
Not yet aware that the world you knew
Crumbled while you slept
I will bring you as much magic as you can hold
To keep your hearts moored in innocence
I cannot stitch your world whole again
I promise to weave you a new tapestry
Rich in dreams
Love
Possibility
My little men
You have learned too early
How unkind the world can be
But we will meet it
Softly
Gently
Together
-gws
"Love is not enough"
This was a truth I gave you
In place of a kiss goodbye
Love is not enough to bridge
The chasm separating us
Neither is it flexible enough
To withstand the tension
It cannot rewrite our history
Erase the years of pain
It cannot alter reality
Nor save our unsalvageable marriage
The love between us is a shadow
A wraith
A remnant
Of a hope dressed up to look like love
In third-hand threadbare finery
The illusion shattered
And the real state of things exposed
-gws
Glass on asphalt
Making a mosaic
Of the mundane world
-gws
I need to unlearn your touch
The sound of your breathing
Next to me in the dark
I need to unlearn a lifetime
Of everything about you
-gws
She is a poet
An enigmatic storyteller
A word-painter who colors outside the lines
Who sometimes rhymes
Language her artistic medium
Manifesting nouns and verbs
Seeking nuanced shades in adjectives and adverbs
Crafting simile and metaphor
Manipulating personification and hyperbole
Until a shape evolves
This scaffolding for allegory to be called a poem
A golem built from meticulously chosen words
Watercolor emotions
Empathetic evocations
The work imbued with the DNA of her life experience
Powered by hope for her audience to feel at a visceral level
A fraction of the tsunami that lives in her
-gws
She dressed for the night
Draped in shadows and silver
Making friends with the darkness
-gws
The Universe intervened
In our amber-trapped lives
Cleaving us asunder
Now that your umbra is clearing
I begin to see the Universe has
Gifted me infinite sunrises
Bursting with innumerable possibilities
After half my life with you
Standing you up
Holding you up
I find myself suddenly free
Of the responsibility of you
I delight in the joy of doing anything
Without your judgment
I relax remembering that there are no
Relentless expectations to navigate
I revel in a full night's uninterrupted sleep
I relinquish more and more tension from my body
As each day passes without you
A single divine gift containing
All the possibilities I can dream of
I will not get over you in a day
You have left me a moonscape
Desolate and damaged
I will redeem and reclaim myself
Both shadow and light
Ever shifting and changing
Just like the magnificent moon
-gws
Holding hands in matching rockers
Laughing about when we were young
You reminiscing about record stores and ska shows
As I tell our grandchildren tales of magic
Spending our sunset days in loving conversations
Each other's best bestie
Strolling into the ever after that follows the happily
-gws
Deep gray clouds cover the sky like a heavy blanket
Rain drums relentlessly on the shiny gray asphalt
The world is a tapestry of gray
Gray is beautiful
This is the glory of rainy days
They leave the world to its quiet contemplation
Its deep introspection
Rain cleanses more than the greater world
It penetrates into the soul
And washes away the dust of living
Rain awakens a simple joy
With renewal and rejuvenation
The meditation of raindrops on glass
Droplets colliding into each other
Reflecting the world in a new perspective while
Drawing meandering paths across glittering window panes
-gws
Inelegant and rough hewn
Invisible to all but me
Oppressive and injurious
This prison of grief and fear
Holds me fast
Arrested
The key to joy held tight in my hand
I wait for the guard to look away
So I can fly free
-gws
Words Wishes and Wisdom 