Crimson Wounds
Poetry in free verse
Poetry in free verse
Time heals everything, they say.
But can time heal
a wound time itself has caused?
Those smiles captured
in that yellowing photograph
still hanging on my wall
long after you left
like a talisman -
a reminder -
of all the moments
I will never live again.
Those smiles, frozen in time
on faces that will never shine so again.
That red t-shirt with Popeye’s face
you didn’t bother to come back for -
the one I used to snatch away from you
on nights I didn’t feel like wearing my own,
and how you used to complain
“These girls love to steal their boyfriend’s clothes”
and I would laugh
for boyfriend’s clothes
were more comfortable than my own.
They still are -
the clothes, not the boyfriend,
for he left
you left.
Time took you away from me
leaving a gaping hole
its passage can never fill.
That red t-shirt, I still have,
some nights, it’s wrapped around my shivering body
like a ghost blanket,
a reminder of warmth now stale.
And on others, it is wound around my head,
a desperate attempt to stifle my shouts,
tears falling and drenching the fabric,
turning red to a deep crimson,
the color of my failed love,
the color of this bleeding heart.
The future lies ahead of me
dark, in all its uncertainty.
The past is behind,
a deep crimson of faded hopes,
redder than the t-shirt you left behind.
I lie, stuck in between,
caught in a breathless limbo,
hanging between a world that was
and a world that will never be.
Yes, the future is dark,
but I watch as the past bleeds into it,
coloring the black a deep crimson,
the crimson of my failed love,
the crimson of you,
the crimson of a wound time left
that time can never heal.
Author’s note: If you liked this piece of work, you would definitely enjoy my best (and previously unpublished) poems which are curated in my book: Stolen Reflections: Some Stories Are Told in Verse. It is a collection of 100 poems exploring 15 different traditional poetry forms, including the haiku, tanka, limerick, palindrome and the modern free verse.