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The Poems I Couldn't Save
I went looking for my old poems
like a man digging through ashes
after the fire trucks leave.
Thought maybe one survived.
One line.
One crooked little verse
still breathing under the rubble.
But memory is a thief
with soft hands.
It doesn’t kick the door in
it slowly empties the house
while you’re distracted trying to survive life.
Some poems were written
on napkins stained with coffee,
some on receipts,
some in notebooks swollen from rain,
some typed at 2 a.m.
while the world slept
and my heart refused to.
And now?
Gone.
Vanished into old phones,
dead laptops,
lost accounts,
boxes buried somewhere
between moving trucks
and heartbreak.
I used to think poetry was permanent.
Turns out paper burns,
ink fades,
hard drives fail,
and sometimes grief
hits harder than memory can hold.
There was one poem
I wrote years ago
damn, it was good too.
The kind that makes you stop breathing
for half a second after the last line.
Now all I remember
is the feeling of writing it.
Like hearing an old song
through the wall of another room.
You can almost make out the words,
but not enough to sing along.
Maybe that’s the cruel joke of being a poet.
We spend our lives
trying to preserve moments
that life itself
is determined to erase.
But here’s the strange thing
Even though the poems disappeared,
the man who wrote them didn’t.
The loss stayed.
The love stayed.
The scars stayed.
The stories stayed.
And maybe poems are less like photographs
and more like campfires.
They were never meant to last forever.
The Poems I Couldn't Save
By Jason Strickland
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The Poems I Couldn't Save
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Art of Poetry craft truth into rhythm. Find your voice, master imagery and form, write bravely, revise sharply, and turn life into lines that last.
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