The Puppy Love

This is for the kiss that thought it was a covenant,

For hands that linked as one, yet were called disparate.

For the garden we planted in the ignorant snow,

Where our puppy love, bright and shameless, could grow.

It grew past the teasing, past the first foolish fight,

Past the secret sweet nothings whispered into the night.

It thought it was a tree, deep-rooted, vast, and true,

Until they brought the lightning no sapling can construe.

Here, the cold slide of a lab report sealed all that was unsaid.

Here, “maturity” meant letting go, not holding on.

Here, pure love was a language the pragmatic world had shunned.

We stood there, you and I, with futures in our eyes,

Watching our fierce, fragile thing meet its swift demise.

Not by our will, but by the stern, unyielding hands

Of genotype’s grim verdict, and social class’s demands.

You left to build a life upon a stable, blessed shore.

I learned to love the phantom knocking at my door.

You guard your peace now, careful not to glance behind,

A happy, married fortress, with a disciplined mind.

And I, in turn, have walked with others in the light,

But flinch to see their joy; a thief of my own night.

Ah, the cosmic joke; we seldom get it all:

The heart’s full bounty answers to a different call.

We get the lesson, not the laurel. We get the scar,

The proof of how magnificent our feelings are,

Then watch them shrink to just a “phase,” a “puppy love,”

A fleeting prelude, from a colder world above.

So, salutations to the love, both brave and absurd,

That blossomed in the cold, but wilted, word by word,

In the dry, legal air where real-world contracts start.

Life isn’t fair, yet not all stains can bleach the heart.

And the ending? Brutal, yes. But funny, in its way,

The fiercest fire fate simply blows away,

To prove the ground for altars must be chosen, not felt,

And the truest love is sometimes the one you were not dealt.

FERT