Poem: An Apology of a Kind

You didn’t call
like you said you would,
and I thought it
wouldn’t bother me
but it did.

Time and again
you said you loved me,
that just thinking
of me kept you
from dying inside,
for the world around you
was already dead.

And I loved you, too,
yet it gave me a
special pain because
of our separate lives
and half-healed wounds.
I didn’t know how
to love you in return

Even though I longed
to walk beside you,
gaze into your eyes
in some backroom of a café
or lay with you in the dark
listening to the lilt of your voice.

But when you reached
for me so strongly
I felt the old fear
and pulled away,
and now you didn’t call
like you said you would,
and I thought it
wouldn’t bother me
but it did.

17 January 2012