To Poetry (Pompously)

I want to write you a poem.
It shouldn't be so difficult, I've done it before.
Write what you know, write where you've been, write how you feel.

I've been the ingénue, seeking a taste of glamour and gambolling in rain-soaked frocks. Chasing epiphanies and waiting for the world to reveal the secret blueprints that must exist for existing. (A girl can dream.)
Once, I believed in balance, in rhyme-schemes, and trite paths to trivial endings.

My words had to change with me. To give voice to the edges of my thoughts-- the things that fit nowhere, but begged sweetly to be said aloud.
I bombarded you with ephemeral eloquence-- glimmers of finesse.

I almost became inured to the face-crumpling regret of routine tragedy. Almost.
And almost, I accepted my own place in that flawed tangle of rights, and wrongs, and very wrongs, and seemingly inevitables.
Almost.

The deluge... was a stream... was a trickle.
And what is left?

I fear sometimes that I have lost you. That you have waited, and languished in disuse.
That I will never be able to capture a scintilla of your essence on paper again.

But you are here.
In the lilting tangential lines I struggle to subdue into recognizable diction.
In the way I listen. Sifting through countless ragamuffin syllables tripping over teeth like puppies to sleep, tumbling head over heels for the sumptuous aural fragrance of a graceful phrase. Mooning over the vestigial remains of you on my tongue.
In the truth I force myself to tell.
I feel you.

Always your gossamer strands catch at me. A cobweb of now unravelled, unrivalled beauty.
In rapture I remain, a palimpsest-- a pastiche.
A patchwork girl with poetry in my hair.

Yours, Truly.