A Word Unsaid Poem by jim hogg

Incurable romantics fish
in ponds and streams they thought they knew
and soon get swallowed whole by things
they hadn't really understood

Emotions that we lock away
at seventeen or twenty five
shake off their chains and suddenly
they'll strut the stage; make old men cry

and drown the present in the past
until the aching floods recede
and leave behind the kind of calm
that kills the urge to scratch and bleed,

to live again the myths we spin
that took us captive for a spell:
that's just a theory I admit,
but I remember being swept

clean off my feet so many times
and flattened when it all went south -
the spark for endless trials of rhymes!
A hungering for love abounds

in spite of the approaching edge.
No, I'm no ripe and juicy peach,
awash in fleeting innocence;
and don't expect to sweetly grieve

for infinitely tender love,
again; the kind that frees and lets
the galaxies within us, flood
with light, and all that's dark, relent

- you know that kind of passing flame,
the swallow's flight, the gemstone glint,
the memory that calls your name,
the glance, the touch, the merest hint,

when almost every vivid thing
seems preordained to thrill just us:
that cheesy song, the golden ring;
no words that can express enough.

But, out the other side of that,
eventually, it might seem right
to write the whole thing off at last,
when all I'm packing is decline.

And so this exile, here and now.
I spend my time just making do
with movie lives, and playing out
the options that I didn't choose:

to marry young or not at all
to join the ranks or drown at sea,
to find out who I really was,
and if not me, then who I'd be?

Or, of the faces that come back,
what other steps were mine to take:
a word unsaid, a different path,
or would the end have been the same?