An Attempted Love Poem

An Attempted Love Poem
By Jonathan Gonnet

A father sat down to write to his wife and his child, to catalog his extreme care
With a pompous gait
And a feverish rate
He planned to pen his love affair

He looked all around
And the absence of sound
Lent a smug sense of self congratulation
He built this home,
And now seated in his throne,
He deigned to bestow, upon his wife, his validation

So he thought ‘what to write?’ and he conjured up times, both of struggle and jubilation
As head of the house
With all the credit he'd douse
Until, suddenly, he had a realization

He undertook this task
As he often did in the past
In selfish error and with the wrong seed of thought
His idea, born in a self-righteous fit
Where he marveled at his wit
What good is sharing his love and the emotion with which he is fraught?

Like the uncomfortable light that shines brightest at dawn
He understood and he awoke clear
Before them both there was fear and nothing but beer (ha!)
Without them, on this earth, he'd be gone

But, I had it all wrong
As if I could buy happiness for a song
I am not some hero, some bastion of love or even (yet) a great man of importance
I am short with my patience,
My temper and stations
But in her I enjoy this, and more, in abundance

Basically everything I have is because of my two special people
We overcome strife
My son and his mother -together- my life
A visual reminder of faith like a church steeple

It's a Mother's devotion
Not some magic potion
Who keeps us tacked from feet to sole (soul) like the cobbler’s
Her ungrateful and daily obligations
Thankless hard work and frustrations
Overlooked both by her 2 and 28 year old toddlers

Her great capacity to love, evidenced all around by what we earlier saw
There's no sound; she changes my son when he's wet
The home I live in is clean, because of her sweat
I can blabber and slobber, and bluster but I won’t hem and haw:

You see, I have to come clean
I was the father attempting to write how much Brex and You mean
I could write a thousand pages for each individual thank.
But, because all that you do with the love you give to us two,
Compared to you, my paper is blank.