[The words below were published accidentally; I intended to “save draft” for later use but they got published, instead. The shards of ideas here are just that—fragments. Much of this will never find its way into a finished poem. That’s good, because good poems don’t deserve such broken pieces of idea.]
He wanted to think of it as a huge jigaw puzzle, all pieces separated and
spilled on the wooden floor, a mess that time and commitment can repair.
But she saw it more as a keepsake crystal vase, purposely dashed on a
hard tile floor, broken into a million shards of irreplaceable antique glass.
The damage was unintentional. It was simply an outgrowth of an attachment to someone else, an attachment that didn’t include her. She, the starry-eyed puppy in love with an idea she thought lived in a person, simply stumbled onto the rocks from his row boat in an ocean of love and hate and indifference.
When that pitcher erupted into a spray of sharp fragments, slicing into her senses like a razor, she sensed the impermanence of love and the permanence of emptiness, the knowledge that a relic of a life taken away is like death, gone forever.
