FOR MY PART

FOR MY PART

(FOR KYLE, FOR VALENTINE’S)

For my part I can only say,
My love for you is constant,
Like a lighthouse on the bay.

For my part I can only sigh,
When I see you standing there,
Kind and oh so patient in my mind’s eye.

I was never much the looker,
The player or the king,
I should not have been the one you chose,
But you chose me for your everything.

You are the ace of spades,
My shining diamond, king of hearts,
What you saw in me I could never see,
But I saw your beauty from the start.
Like the shade of a sheltering tree.
And I still see it even now,
Sometimes hard to articulate,
A handsome man in handsome clothes,
The too cool captain of my fate.

Standing there, naïve and fair,
Not dreaming what was in the air,
The Parkinson’s, the impotence,
The muted echoes of despair.
The poverty, the aborted trips,
The sleepless nights, the sinking ships.
The financial burdens and the woes,
You’ve loved me true through all of those.

You bravely took the drop with me,
Into these frigid lonesome seas,
Never a prophet or a seer,
Or a fortune teller could you be.

But magically you have stayed the course,
Like some jouster perched high upon his horse,
And oh how you’ve parried and sallied forth for me,
Doing mortal combat with this crippling disease.

And after all is said and done,
It is you who should stand proud,
For you were faithful to the end and I sing your praises loud.

And I gave nothing in return
But lasting love that brightly burns
I hope to heaven that that was enough,
The poetry and the flowers, the paltry pretty stuff.
In the end I gave you all I owned,
My tired and desperate bleeding heart.
It was all I had to offer you, for my part.

-Bruce Potts
Copyright 2012
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED