A Melancholy Feeling A melancholy feeling comes when love has gone An empty silence at the end of useless words I hardly knew you long enough to comprehend goodbye Since our inexplicable goodbye was never even said Long before your face intruded into my consciousness I had supposed that love was just a timeworn memory Bittersweet, transient, ephemeral, a dream of foolish fancy But then, the whimsy of my youth returned anew And startled me awake with passion's wild imaginings For a moment I forgot that what we think of one another Versus what we really are--sadly--tends to be unequal And so that elusive phantom, love, again has slipped away And disappeared into the mistiness of the past And I am left here one more time without a clue To explain how love appears so magically, then fades Bewildered, I can't pretend to be tragically bereft Since there never was a vow declared, or promise made Nothing ventured, nothing gained--and almost nothing lost Yet... that melancholy feeling comes when love has gone And I cannot help wondering about what might have been Poetry