And Nothing Is Ever As You Want It To Be Poem by Brian Patten
And Nothing Is Ever As You Want It To Be
You lose your love for her and then
It is her who is lost,
And then it is both who are lost,
And nothing is ever as perfect as you want it to be.
In a very ordinary world
A most extraordinary pain mingles with the small routines,
The loss seems huge and yet
Nothing can be pinned down or fully explained.
You are afraid.
If you found the perfect love
It would scald your hands,
Rip the skin from your nerves,
Cause havoc with a computered heart.
You lose your love for her and then it is her who is lost.
You tried not to hurt and yet
Everything you touched became a wound.
You tried to mend what cannot be mended,
You tried, neither foolish nor clumsy,
To rescue what cannot be rescued.
You failed,
And now she is elsewhere
And her night and your night
Are both utterly drained.
How easy it would be
If love could be brought home like a lost kitten
Or gathered in like strawberries,
How lovely it would be;
But nothing is ever as perfect as you want it to be.
I read this poem in an anthology of poetry and I couldn't believe how spot on Brian is/was.... the final stanza says it all, a very fine poem that deserves its place in the Top 500. HG: -) xx
yes, indeed, nothing is ever as perfect as you want it to be...
i'm impressed after read your poem..it's really beautiful...great poet u are..
I too have long loved this poem... but in the printed version I have the title reads 'And nothing is ever AS PERFECT as you want it to be' Ah, now that's better!
Poetry is beyond all limits.I am not even native but the way it made me feel is definitely worth feeling.
a wise worded poem of if only life would be much easier? if only I had gone to Sefton Park school instead of going to Earle Road school I might have turned out to be a proper poet? ......................wonderfully written BP and best wishes.
Language evolves. We no longer use thee and thine and nowadays we’re more likely to use her rather than she in such a sentence. In this poem the use of her is more lyrical than she which sounds distant and more strident. It also adds to the symmetry of the line and is more evocative of the lover’s sadness. A poem, unlike prose has a wide, acceptable margin of syntactic flexibility. There’s nothing to be gained by sticking to grammatical correctness here than it would to punctuate e e cummings. It’s best to let the integral beauty of this poem simply to wash over you.
This poem has not been translated into any other language yet.
I would like to translate this poem
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1/21/2025 5:28:34 PM # 1.0.0
I have read these poems from end to start and they are all beautifully fabulous.