I’m sorry you even had to read that. In defence of the scribe as a young man, I think I knew full well at the time that this was an indulgent abomination. I remember sitting on a chilly Sunday morning in the Bridgehead at Bank and Gilmour, perched on a high stool at a round table nursing a mug of coffee with too much cream and sugar. It felt good to feel driven to write, even if the drive was a seemingly life-shattering sense of guilt and loss.

As the words came together, I knew they were bad. I knew the whole thing was a bad idea. Nobody should have been allowed to read it. Nobody did. Instead, they heard it. They heard this awful jumble spill forth from my own wine-stained lips.

I somehow decided that it was both good and proper for me to perform this little piece at an open mic. And what a performance it was. Me, standing unsteady, shaking with nerves I hadn’t learned to control yet. My voice trembling and wavering, slurring slightly from the wine, cracking obviously as I reached the end. My eyes darted around wildly, from my paper, to the back of the room, to the row where she sat glaring at me like the caricature of human shortcoming that I was.

I think I abruptly ran out afterwards, my very public contrition before our peers having exhausted my capacity to appear before others. Even my friends had trouble looking me in the eyes.

What a shambles. Although I suppose in some way the ends of most relationships are just that. Love in all of its forms is frequently consigned to a squirming death on the table, like those live octopi they eat in Korea. We’re left with a tangled mess of loose ends and unfinished sentences, lopped branches of feeling with no trunk to connect them.

From the unnecessary repetition of words, to the forced rhyming structure, to the melodramatic tone, this poem is definitely one of my worst.

“Curse the setting sun?” Really? You’d think our tortured poet had lived a life of abject vice, like a character from a Hardy novel.

Just to clarify, in this case, “all the things we’ve done” refers to me feeling like a jerk for breaking up with someone, even though it was definitely the right thing to do.

No actual murders were committed; I didn’t even really miss her that much.