Loss of Innocence

“Your poems aren’t simple anymore; I don’t enjoy them”

 says he,

I smiled but couldn’t tell him

that the day he had gone,

 he left

 a few smiles

some laughter

a couple of reminiscences

and a tale of innocence

on my courtyard.

Since then I have 

 fumbled around

collecting them,

 gathering them,

bit by bit

speck by speck

to place them in my poems.

In this effort of mine, and

in my struggle to measure the rainfall

that blurs my window,

I kept on disentangling

the trapped lines,

the cluttered limbs of my poem,

to capture his face that quivers in memory,

for just one more time;

I grew weary,

I faltered

in my vain strive to hold onto him,

to untangle and smoothen the lines

that lay jumbled and knotted with his thoughts.

What I didn’t realize is that

life has moved on ever since, and

a pity

I ended up writing words and rhetoric,

so devoid of life,

showcasing unnecessarily

my linguistic expertise;

but to my dismay they remained

one step short from

being a poem

as he had taken away the simplicity

the day he left.