This is a poem by John Tustin.
Shadows of the past
loom large over me.
Cast a gauzed smoggy pall
over all I am.
And I think of the mess
I made of things,
the mess I make of things,
will always
make of things.
A tremulous ship,
rudderless,
frayed sails,
shattered compass,
blood splattering the decks,
battered beyond repair
or recognition.
Tossed
in the toxic tempest.
I wasn’t good to you
a life time ago;
I dwell on that.
And I can still see you crying
as you packed up your hair dryer.
I sat impassively,
not sure if I should let
my own tears come.
I didn’t even wait with you
at the bus stop.
You didn’t know it
and I didn’t know it,
but the words I had in me
were all written for you.
I held them inside me
most of the time.
For a dozen years
I couldn’t speak,
didn’t want to,
not because I lost you,
but because I let you go.
You told me years later
(when we happened to meet
and I apologized for all I was
and wasn’t)
that we were “just kids” then,
but I was as old
as I was going
to get.
I think of you now
and I want you smiling,
I want you to love.
Your eyes always
betrayed your emotions,
as my actions
exposed my phenomenal lacking.
I never grow,
I expand,
basking in my profundity.
Repeating my detrimental proclivities,
dismayed eternally by my emotional violence.
I was afraid
I would break you,
fragile beautiful thing
just removed from the box,
me a childly oaf
knowing only how to demand
and demolish.
You were
sharp
and ambitious
and so beautiful
and I was
none of those things
and you always had somewhere
to go.
John Tustin began writing poetry again dozen years ago and his poetry has appeared in many disparate literary journals, online and in print. Fritzware.com/johntustinpoetry contains links to his published poetry online.
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