Man in my mind

man in my mind
when I find you
be kind and say
in what way I
have strayed in
imagining –
for in dreams I
invent wildly.
what minds devise
it is wise to
revise and see
if it be real
or merely hope.
I will cope – shed
no moping tear-
if the feared truth
appears swiftly
before the dream
is sweetened by
habit’s lies and
you my dream-mate
kindle hate in
my aching soul
– for the sole cause
of so much pain
is refraining
from claiming truth.

This poem responds to two prompts – firstly the image prompt from readwritepoem, which set me thinking about how we create images of people in our mind that can be divorced from reality. And secondly the Miss Rumphius Poetry Stretch, which made use of the challenging climbing rhyme form, which has lines of 4 syllables with a rhyme scheme that looks like this:

X X X A
X X A X
X A X B
X X B X
X B X C… and so on

It’s an intriguing form and I enjoy the challenge of trying to fit what I want to say into such a difficult structure. I find I always want to add another couple of lines because I’ve not managed to fit what I wanted into the previous ones… but strangely the end result feels quite compact!