YOU.
by Shameelah Khan
I promised myself that I would write you a poem
I didn’t want anything special. Not the verbose words or seductive structure
I wanted something that mimicked our love
A poem so powerful, only in its silences does it speak
Its pauses and breaths slip away in subtlety
The anger in the end was nothing but a misleading love affair
I wanted to write a poem so rich, its essence is captured through commas and full stops
The stops that remind me to remember where our love had ended
Most times
I wanted the emptiness of the poem to tell you that I’ve stopped missing you
But we know too well I write poetry best in strings of lies
I wanted the poem to bleed into itself, syllable by syllable
I wanted the first word to matter
And the last word to linger
I wanted to write you a poem
And over the years, it wrote itself as something that once mattered
Our poem started and ended with heartbreak
And in the spaces of heartbreak were words that rhymed with my name
And my name spoke truth and my name spoke pain
And then I lifted my pen and all but one word remained: YOU.
