Love Poem: Darkness and Light
Bill Drayton Avatar
Written by: Bill Drayton

Darkness and Light

DARKNESS AND LIGHT

My friend, you seek to wound 
With a knife, sharpened from 
Bile-imbued speech,
Twisting through to the heart's fragility.

A life bleeds crimson into weeping 
Earth and you, smirking 
Wantonly out from
Behind an artificial facade,
Barely able to conceal the suppressed pain
Inside your blighted frame.

You mock the inconvenient 
Before blinkered eyes -
That which accords not with the acceptable,
In adherence to rules, laid down
From an unmoved tradition.

You need the skeletal framework 
Of structure and routine 
To bolster an inadequate existence;

Familiar only with restrictive darkness,
You hate difference or variation,
The obscure smothering attempts 
To discover the glaringly obvious.

Yet still you wound me at the fork in the road,
As though it's your life's work to do so,
I now speak the truth in my defence,
Succeeding to deflect your arrows 
With the impenetrable shield of love.