With Valentine’s Day just behind us, I thought it was appropriate to include another poem about love…even if it is about love gone wrong. This poem reminds me of a poem from my first book “Walk Through a Field of Flowers…” called The Last Waltz which I wrote when I was very young. That poem is also about a break-up, as someone watches flames dancing in a fireplace as they contemplate their lost relationship. I don’t write a lot about love and romance, either good or bad, so when the inspiration on that topic hits, I grab it quickly. Sometimes the words just come to me and I have to let them flow. That being said, neither poem is autobiographical, but I am sure most people can relate on some level to a relationship turning sour.
This next poem compares the other person in the relationship to a glass of water; icy cold and transparent. Love and hate. Fire and ice. Such strong opposites that exist in the world of romance (although as Elie Wiesel, prolific writer and Holocaust survivor famously once said, “the opposite of love is not hate, it is indifference”.).
I did enjoy the comparison of this person to a glass of ice water. Many people have been compared to ice, such as being called an ice queen, or as in the popular Foreigner song “Cold as Ice.” I really love this line from Christina Perri’s song “Jar of Hearts”: “You’re gonna catch a cold from the ice inside your soul.” Its lines such as these that remind us love has a temperature. When romance is hot, it’s sizzling, but when love goes wrong, we’d better have a parka nearby, because that thermometer is going to drop well below the freezing point.
Ice Water
You are like a glass of water,
Icy cold and transparent.
I can see right through you;
Your motives are apparent.
You should not have been surprised
When I showed you the door.
Just like an empty glass of water,
You leave me wanting more.
When you knew that I was onto you
You acted so distraught.
But the reason for your flustered state
Was because you had been caught.
You were like that glass of water
Sitting in the heat;
Sweat, like condensation,
From your head down to your feet.
Your voice now grates upon my skin
Which I somehow find ironic,
As your words, they used to comfort me,
And soothe me like a tonic.
So I am moving on from you,
Before it is too late.
Is it wrong for me to wish
That you would evaporate?
It’s time to reprioritize
And put my own needs first.
So I’m dumping you down the drain;
You no longer quench my thirst.
-K.A. Bloch-
