Love can be –
What you see
In another –
That others –
Including themselves –
Don’t see in themselves –
Including when it
Does not exist
04.17.16
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Copyright by Minh Tan on listed dated of completion.
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Notes to this poem…
This poem might be a bit hard to make sense of. I even had to think about it upon re-reading to post and annotate. However, I didn’t change a thing as it said what I was looking to say, how I wanted to say it.
The poem is about my feelings and analysis of seeing someone I was once interested in with the person she had chosen instead. What she saw in him that made her love him, was just an illusion she unconsciously conjured up for herself that helped her romanticize who he was, rather than seeing him for what he was. I can’t say more than that without risking this might be read by some people to identify that person.
Interestingly enough, he didn’t see himself as that romantic image which she had conjured up to see him as, either. It’s not like he was lacking confidence or self-belief to see that something in himself, as often happens with our negative self-image. The quality didn’t exist. She loved someone for something that didn’t exist in him.
Over time, I am happy to say I don’t think this woman and I would have made a good pair. She had flaws I could not live with. But is it better to have loved and lost, than never to have loved at all? Depends on the case. Still, it’s never a good feeling to have been judged so unfairly.
As a side note, this sentimental feeling about someone I had once loved*, but no longer do, there’s a word for that.
Did you know that? 🙂
* As in felt in love towards and not loved as in being in a relationship.
The O-series of poems are one stanza poems composed before I got onto writing haiku and tanka, and short poetry while in action or traveling by select means like plane or ferry. These poems are 3-9 lines long with at least one rhyming couplet, and not of the short forms just mentioned. For the sake of elegance, I just called the collection One.
Minh Tan's Old Poetry 
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