A Poem For You Poem by Abby Koning

I poised my pen above
This too-empty paper
And waited for the brilliance-
That lay in wait behind the point
In a messy conglomeration of blues or blacks
Or in even more disorganized chaos in my mind-
to pour forth
In streams and rushing torrents
All about you.
All for you.
But nothing came.
And my canvas remained dry.

I wanted to create an image of you
With words so saccharine sweet
And lyrically sappy lines such as
“His eyes are not like the stars
They are like the moon
Shining more brightly alone than all the stars
Combined.”
But that simply falls
A word and a mile
And a lifetime
Too short.

Or suppose I should begin
With a metaphor
“You are the world.
Nothing less.
Nothing more
Simply and inexplicably the world.”
And extend it thus for lines until
The whiteness is filled with something
Lacking brilliance but containing substance
But it’s all so clichéd
For you are like none other
And none of these words are coming out
Quite right
It appears you have dammed up
Or maybe outstripped
My streams of brilliance
By being so…incomprehensible!

A most beautiful blockade of indefinable substance.

Frustration builds and still my pen
Remains without declining ink
And this paper turns its
Garish white stare upon me
Demanding to be filled
Demanding to be smeared with
An impeccable image of you
Yet it only resembles a bruise of letters.
An alphabet for the unhappy shadow
Trying so hard to emulate the night.

But ink doesn’t do you justice
And words could never capture
Who you are
Or what you mean to me
And all the brilliance of literature
Of poetry
Of me
Fades to naught but a candle besides your exceeding
Moonlit glow.

A string of adjectives perhaps could aid
But which to use for you?
“Indescribable” or “Unbelievable”
“Dazzling” “Radiant”
“Made of light
And grace
And beauty.”
“Whimsical as a child at a
Carnival
Surrounded by sugary cotton-candy scent
Whirling lights and buzzing voices”
But you are so much more than that.

I longed to write a poem for you.
But you are a poem in yourself
That to write down
In mere mortal creations such as
Words
With use of even more mortal
And thus, more tedious
Punctuation and grammar
Would render
Nothing but a feeble plagiarism

And all these useless, frivolous
Clauses, adjectives, sentences, phrases
All these nonsensical disjointed words
Amount to nothing more meaningful,
Nothing more poetic
Nothing more brilliant
Nothing more like you
Than each individual drip-dropp of water
Falling sluggishly from a leaky faucet
Only to plink emptily down the rusty drain.