It’s Poetry Tuesday! We are going to go back through all my old notebooks and look at the god-awful poetry I wrote when I was an angsty teen and then you will get present day Michelle’s re-interpretation/headdesk horror-filled embarrassment.

Till the End of Time

Your arms cradle me in my sleep,
But when I wake you’re gone,
I see your face where ever I go
But it’s never you.

I’ll wait till the end of time for you
Nothing can change what I feel for you
I trust in God and your love that you’ll come back.
Back to me, back to my love

I don’t care when you tell me you’re scum
I don’t hear when you say you’re bad for me
What you say means nothing, I know what’s in your heart
Love. I love you.

I’ll wait till the end of time for you
Nothing can change my mind
It is set on the fact that you love and care for me
So please hurry back to me my love

My neighbor saw you on my stoop
But you were gone by the time I got home
You left me hope and a note
Saying you loved me

I’ll wait till the end of time for you
It’s you or no one at all
I don’t care if I live in Hell as long as I have you
If you gave me choice I’d choose you.

You visit me regularly in my dreams
I worry for you and my friends worry about me
No matter what
My body, heart and soul belong to you.

I’ll wait till the end of time for you
For I know you’d do the same for me
If I die before I see you; I’ll wait for you in heaven
Our love can survive even death itself.

People try to change my mind but that is impossible,
My heart and mind are made up
Nothing can make me love another
You’re my one and only

I’ll wait till the end of time
To hold you in my arms without worry you’ll leave
To fall asleep and wake up to your voice
To never have to worry about you again

So take your time for I shall wait regardless
I will wait in this house for you
So you don’t have to look for me
I trust you to come home to me

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So this poem came to me in a fit of inspiration after watching episode five of an anime called Kikaider. Looking up the anime to find out which episode it was I discovered that this anime is FUCK OFF OLD. I was watching this in high school and feeling all badass and cool and cutting edge when in reality it was from 1972. Dear God. *covers face and cries* It’s almost as bad as that time I fell in love with Vanessa Carlton’s cover of Paint it Black not knowing that it was a cover and was ready to fight my dad over how it was SO NOT A REMAKE AND IT WAS TOTALLY AWESOME AND ORIGINAL AND HERS. People need to seriously not cover old songs because it messes up the current generation. They start to think they know good music and then the rug is pull out from underneath them and then therapy. Lots and lots of therapy.

Well, looking over this poem and last week’s again, I think it might be safe to say that my need for therapy was obvious at a young age. I had a real obsession with True Love and The One and (melo)drama. It started young, I mean real young. Still-playing-with-Barbies young. My cousin just wanted to have everyone be happy, but MY Barbies, well this one was pregnant with that one’s kid and we just couldn’t TELL him, it had to be a big secret and hidden and then DRAMATIC REVEAL. It wasn’t helped by me inheriting a few boxes of Harlequin romance novels in sixth grade that I devoured and then moved on to my sister’s much coveted romance selection which included J.D. Robb, Nora Robert, Julie Garwood, and many others.

By high school I was over my head in anime, manga, and fanfiction. Ah, fanfiction. The story may have ended for the actual author, but for the rest of the world it continues on through fanfiction where people with varying levels of writing ability re-write, continue, or add on to the original story, typically with x-rated levels of smut.

But to focus back on the actual point of this post, this poem was actually my favorite for pretty much forever. I wrote a companion piece for it that I will post next week and then when I had to write a poem for French class I translated a simpler form of this poem for class. Re-reading this poem makes me realize how even from a young age loyalty, devotion, and dedication were imperative to me. It got twisted into a gnarly martyr complex that I am working through now, but when I read this I can still feel my younger self’s deep conviction that with the right person you would wait for years and years, even until death or the end of time, just to see them one more time. It is a conviction I know still resides in my heart despite my now more practical stance on love.

On some level, it is easier to love someone from a distance because you can romanticize them. You don’t have to deal with the reality of their faults – snoring, not putting the toilet seat down, differing tastes in food, differing opinions on politics, etc. It’s harder, and more fulfilling, to love the person with you every day because you can become complacent and take them for granted. To wake up every day and acknowledge their faults and flaws and still love them is something that is hard for a teenager to comprehend and see as heroic and daring. But it is.