I Fell in Love

I fell in love with a tinker

He was good with his hands –

- tee hee, tee hee, you know what I mean –

And he was good with his heart.

I became the thing he mended,

The broken-stringed guitar that now played nightingale notes.

An eye for the details,

He noticed far more than I planned.

 

I fell in love with a tailor,

Oh, and wasn’t he fine?

Creaseless and coiffed,

A light shining across so many rooms.

All the rooms.

Glitter and glamour and glitz.

Oh, his promises could fill a book.

I’d pretend in the night that he was really mine.

 

I fell in love with a soldier

 - rat-a-tat-tat-tat, tat-tat –

 - the booming of thunder faraway –

Bloody-eyed, my soldier,

His heart-beat loud like coming storms,

His temper a-flare in the dim hours of twilight;

His creeping, searing return to my fold.

But I loved him for all that.

 

I fell in love with a sailor,

- well, don’t we all? –

- My cliché topples mountains, overshadows skyscrapers –

His salty breath filled our kisses,

His sand-paper skin weathered by the weather, tempered by the sun.

I loved him for the ocean,

For the foreverness of the sea that drains into the horizon,

For the adventure and the endlessness,

For the colour of blue that mates with the sky.

But his eyes would never linger on me long,

They yearned toward that unending space,

He’d never not answer that call.

 

I fell in love with a rich man.

 - well we all wish we could –

And my rich man, he spoiled me,

There was nothing he wouldn’t buy,

No diamond too large, and no dress too expensive,

No palatial home with landscaped gardens and sculpted hedges,

Too fine a thing to bestow.

And yes, I did know

Those other touches,

Those scents of cinnamon and lavender and citrus.

I wanted to keep him,

If only he could have learnt how to be good.

 

I fell in love with a poor man,

He had nothing to offer but a song.

But a song can be enough,

If it’s sung with a pure, rich heart.

And my poor man’s song was a thing of beauty,

A thing built up of base metals and glowing carbon,

A thing borrowed from the very earth itself,

Awash with its bloody magma.

I could forget the spareness of a room where the wind blew through the walls,

Where the wallpaper peeled and the tap never stopped dripping,

So long as he would hold me, so long as I could sing along.

 

I fell in love with a beggar-man.

- does that happen? Can it be? –

But it did.

And he was fire, he had passion in his eyes,

Some would mistake it for madness,

And for all that I knew he was destined to burn and shatter,

I couldn’t let it matter,

I was always sure he loved me.

 

And then I fell in love with a thief.

And I saw myself in his eyes.

That hunger I can never fill.

There’s always something to run to, or run from,

This jittery, impatient soul inside me,

That can never love for long.

And he stole my heart, did that thief,

Before I had cause to know that it was gone.

He carried it away with him while I slept beneath his sheets.

And as far as I know, he has it still.

 

Picture credit/discredit: author's own work.