Poems and Pins

To see more poems, pins, pictures, quotes, and images I've created or collected that reflect my feeling for Irene and our life here and in the hereafter, visit my Pinterest boards here.  Feel free to share these images!

Why
Many times, you’ve asked me
Why I love you ... 
What’s in it for me,
what benefit I receive 
What value you add to my life, 
When time and again
living with you 
Has forced me through
Heartbreak. Insecurity. Anger. 

You ask if I wouldn’t be better off 
Finding someone else,
Someone who loved me 
The way I want to be loved, 
With less chaos and effort.
I can’t really say why 
I love you so much. 

I can point at the way
you can play one moment, 
Be serious the next,
be tender and then tough, 
Be sarcastic and then flirty, 
Change from indifferent
to passionate in a heartbeat 
And while that might
show you a small piece, 
And I might show you
many such small pieces, 
Even when
you fit them all together 
They won’t show you why,
because altogether they
do not add up to the whole. 
The whole is more
than your smile, your wit, your 
compassion and kindness
that lie beneath your 
occasionally venomous tongue.

There is more than your strength 
and your vulnerability, 
Your constant hopes
that sometimes
turn into hidden tears, 
The bravado that covers sorrows,
The joy in your dancing eyes and 
The little secrets you keep 
Mostly in the defense of the hearts 
of others. Maybe I see in you much 
of what I want to see in myself, 
And I look to you to figure out how 
to bring into me the things I find 
so attractive about you, 

And perhaps I find other things
with you to help me understand what 
I don’t like about myself.
When I hurt you, or let you down, 
Failed to be there when you
needed me, I find ways of making 
myself a better man. 

Beyond all that
All the explanations
Beyond your beauty,
your light, your dark,
Your joy, your sorrow, 
The endless hours of passion
And delightful communication
And falling asleep next to you ... 
Beyond all explanation
I know that to be without you 
Would turn my world into
a lifeless, painful, bleak existence
Where my only comfort
And my greatest torture
Would be to think of you. 

I love you so much, Irene.
Always. Never doubt or forget it.
You are everything to me. 

- Bill

In Time

In time, all things are better understood for what they are to the whole and not for what they seem to be in the moment.  The moment is full of tiny words and events and actions that, taken by themselves, without the context  of time, would appear to be far more important and meaningful than they truly are. 

Some words, and some events, and some actions are so dramatic that they call attention to themselves, and it is easy to focus on them and evaluate them without respect for all that which precedes and surrounds them, like a volcano that spews molten rock and ash; even when surrounded by an eternal ocean that dwarfs the volcano in time and space, we notice the sound and fury, and forget the ocean that endures. 

And similar such things, we like to connect, like islands in an ocean; we tend to ignore the ocean, and notice only the islands, inventing patterns in our focus on them that are meaningless to the eternal waters that surround them. 

The ocean of our time together, our love, the full context of who we are together is not defined by a few scattered islands or a raging volcano that spews and boils the nearby waters for a few days. Our love encompasses and dwarfs those things and renders them, eventually, only as fleeting monuments to the depth and breadth of the endless ocean of our love in which they momentarily reside.  Our love will always endure. 

- Bill