I'm leaving you

[Nester]

I'm leaving us my love,
my reckless entanglement,
my fucking mad, headlong descent
into today.
You swore we'd die entwined
in each other,
loving each other.
Give me a chance you said,
to prove my love, you said.
Ha! you had me there,
I didn't ever see this coming,
This cold, this freezing cold,
I'd have taken hatred any day.
Didn't I deserve that,
at least that?
Didn't I, my love?

I agree with much of what's been said, especially how hard it is to write a good love poem. The problem is that love is such a powerful, irrational emotion that it doesn't feel right to put limits on it: I'm pretty good at avoiding cliches, but when I tell my friends about falling in love, I sound like a bad rom-com. But poetry must use concrete language, with images that the reader can latch onto: that's so hard to do when you're writing about love, because it seems self-evident to you, and darn near incommunicable to everyone else.

One way through this is to pick something very specific, and write about that. For example, if you want to write about a breakup, you might write about the traffic ticket you got driving home afterwards. Avoid obvious comparisons (e.g. flowers dying, funerals, etc.), unless you can put a new spin on them (e.g. you're driving to the breakup, but you can't get there because you're stuck behind a funeral procession).

Hope this helps,

Nester