The One That Started it All
Enough rhyming couplets and dreamy metaphor.
The love we had was just like that.
Fleeting words and signs like semaphore:
adoration, destruction, combat.
Now that love has gone away,
in a sense, it still remains,
as while you’ve run and turned astray
your love pumps through my veins.
It keeps me breathing while awake.
Perhaps that’s why I smoke,
to clear the pain from the pure heartache,
and to plaster up what you broke.
Now our love exists in simple objects:
hair ties, jewellery, and notes.
And though to you, I was just a project,
my love to you I wrote
on fluttering paper, reams upon reams
bound in scented envelopes,
fleeting memories, dreams within dreams,
and poorly placed last hopes.
Biography: I am a second-year history student at the University of Reading. I started writing poetry a few months into my first year, sitting in my bed in my halls, lamenting the fact my girlfriend at the time had broken up with me. It is a horrendously cliche reason to write poetry, but nonetheless, I found myself scribbling endlessly throughout my sleepless first-year nights. One such night I wrote the poem ‘The one that started it all’. I wrote it for myself, and often I write to or for other people, even if they’ll never read it. Whenever I have low moments, quiet nights where my thoughts run wild, or even the occasional moment when I feel vaguely overwhelmed, I write. When I observe things, either about myself or the world around me, I write. I’m glad I could finally share some of my work with other people.