After I Loved You

After I loved you I became so tiny

I was microscopic. I could not be seen.

I was so quiet I could not be heard.

I was invisible. You walked past me.

I was a ghost. You walked through me.

 

You left me on the hall table. You forgot

I was there. I looked at the wall for years.

It was smooth and quiet and empty.

I pressed my face to it. I could not scream.

I was smooth and quiet and empty.

 

There was nothing to say.

 

After I loved you I became so small

I was trapped. I could not reach

a chair in my own house. I slid off the bed

there behind the hamper, caught

in your blue flannel shirt. I was a particle

of food dropped on the dining room floor.

 

After I loved you I became a dust mote.

I floated in the still afternoon and landed

on a photograph of myself when I was me.

But I was only dust, and I lay unaware

of life trapped in the glass beneath me.

 

 

Reviews

[Tim McGovern]

Kinda different for you.
This has a very child-like quality about it, and by that I mean when I read it, it feels as though it's a little girl speaking.
I don't know if thats what you intended but it really hit me.

the last verse feels..incomplete or awkward
i know what you are trying to say but I think it needs stronger wording.

I think the repetition works in one way, it would be a totally different poem without it..I think it would sound more " grown up" and I'm not sure that would be better.

So I'm a big help huh?
lol


I like it
: P

[[untitled]]

Just a dusty curio. An incubator perhaps.
Another mismatch who did not wonder and watch
as you made toast and coffee in the morning.
Rather he became a millstone around your neck.
And you ceased to be his teenage
masturbation fantasy. No fault all around.
Just a mismatch. "I yam what I yam! Popeye
I always blame the guy because I'm one
and we can be the s***s. unless......
You are so fine a writer,
Jack

[Toni Prehoda Kahler]

"There was nothing to say" shouts loudly from the center, like a voice from a podium announcing its truth.

I love how it sits there surounded by stanzas of quiet descriptions, language that lets you disappear. It is visual meaning - how perfect!

I also thought the repetiton added to the increasing emptiness, the feeling of "trapped". This poem whispers "I was, I was, I was..." and moves me.

[Blackbirdsong]

This is such a powerful way of describing what it feels like to lose yourself in a relationship. The repetition of the small, invisible person becomes more powerful and more painful with each line. The food scrap on the floor and the dust mote were especially heart wrenching. The last lines about seeing themselves in a photograph and the dust trapped inside the glass, what else can I say, but that this is a masterfully written poem.