In my attempts to write a poem
I’ve found that I must keep
Some thoughts and feelings kept away
Buried in notes app deep
For those I love and those I hate
I keep their privacy
So when I bear my soul to page
Most of you need not see
This grand adventure all began
With an experiment
To try and dispel my feelings
Before my heart was rent
Jane Austen said that love would die
In tightly formed sonnet
So I said to myself: “why not?”
And attempted her bet
But what I found surprised me then
While wretched in my dorm
There’s more to poetry than love
There’s beauty in the form
And buried deep are first attempts
That few will ever read
‘Cause Austen’s right that poetry
Can stifle love’s first seed
But as she says in her old book
When feelings have deep roots
Such actions can but water them
And fertilize offshoots
My worries flow in rhyming verse
Encouraged by my friend
And feelings come, but then they go
I’d thought they’d never end
But end they do, in many ways
They’re starved and burned and snuffed
And sometimes you just have to say
“I think I’ve had enough”
Then left behind are written words
Engraved as if in stone
But even those can be erased
Deleted from a phone
And so some poems I hide away
Far out of human sight
Archived away until the day
I render them alight
In passionate and somber tone
Are words upon the page
Put on a shelf to collect dust
Until the end of age