Poetry: 'Love's Lament'

Have you ever been with someone;
someone who's slightly off?
Whose head, while yours was in the clouds,
was face down in a trough?
Have you ever noticed how you shine
eclipses all they are?
How your growth casts shadows of distress
and drapes them in the dark?

Have you seen beyond the flattery
and honeyed words received?
The deafening silence, loneliness,
and bitterness that seethes?
Have you ever tread the devil snake
who's writhing in despair,
beneath your heel of saintliness
and crying out for air?

Do you stop to wonder
how your shine precedes their thunder?
That when the stars align for you
their heavens burst asunder?
Or is the approbation
a buoyant buffer zone;
too distant although within reach;
too different dialects they speak;
one landscape lush the other's bleak?
Your throne fashioned from bone.

These gusts of laud which loft you up
buffet them tirelessly...
This windswept lonely moorland soul
erodes to steep ravine.
Have you ever been with someone;
someone who must pretend?
Who's never felt like they belong
to this world you're living in?

Have you noticed how you shine
is matched by how they gloom?
How what you celebrate as life,
to them is but a tomb? And,
how the love that you attract
contributes to their wounds?

Perhaps some day they'll change their tune.
Perhaps the tables turn.
But, for now the fable's writ is such:
one's quenched while one must burn.