Love Poem: In Loving Ruin
Joseph Specht Avatar
Written by: Joseph Specht

In Loving Ruin

I bled for you—
and now I fear I have run dry,
drained of love, of purpose, of self,
yet still, it was not enough.

My heart aches, but this wound is my own,
a betrayal of the self,
a blade I wielded against my own best interest.

I am trapped in the cycle,
repeating the same heartbreak,
chasing ghosts through the corridors of memory,
reaching for echoes of the feeling you gave me.

Am I broken? A wound that festers, never mending?
Or merely a speck in the wind,
a passenger of fate’s cruel indifference?
To this, I have no answer.

For as I age, the weight of knowing nothing grows heavier.
And yet, with clarity comes consequence

I now see why you left,
why your words cut clean to my bones.

I know why I could never be
what you needed.

So who is there to blame but myself?
And so I bleed,
wounds open, fever unbroken,
for to let go of this pain
is to sever the last thread of peace
I have ever known.