And So It Goes

In every heart there is a room,

A sanctuary safe and strong,

To heal the wounds from lovers past,

Until a new one comes along.

When we first met, I saw your eyes,

And felt a stirring from inside,

And though I tried to stop my heart,

To you it flew, to my surprise.

I’ve felt the flame of love before,

I have the burns to prove it so,

I know this spark is here for you,

And I’m afraid that it will grow.

We spoke today of nothing much,

But it was time I loathed to end.

And when it did, you strolled away,

Except, somehow, you seemed to stay.

You occupy my mind too much,

Are with my thoughts from first to last.

I sense that in your mind I do not

even linger past goodbye.

I know that you cannot be mine

(That’s even if you wanted to),

And yet I am ashamed to say,

It seems you have my heart to break.

“So his other poem is just Ozymandias but worse, and now this poem blatantly copies Billy Joel? Does this Zack guy write anything original??” Hey, if you’re going to steal, steal from the best, right? That’s what Shakespeare did (insert Dr. Storm descending angrily from the ceiling).

In all seriousness, Billy Joel’s song And So It Goes touched me deeply, and this poem is basically my own personal version of it. You could even sing my poem to Billy’s tune if you really wanted to, for some odd reason. I can’t imagine what one would stand to gain from such an endeavor, but hey, it’s a possibility. What I love about the original song is how vulnerable and lonely it is. I read it as his internal monologue, expressed through song, as he tries to open up after a bad relationship, falls too hard, and has to go on knowing he won’t ever have her. Worse, she never even knew about his feelings, and his song is his coping with that. My poem keeps the same ideas and meter as the original, and tries to keep the same light rhyme scheme (one rhyme per stanza). The novel (and personal) idea I tried to express was a speaker who fell for someone without ever expecting or intending to in the slightest. When this happens, a person is simultaneously deeply happy and profoundly sad. My poem perhaps intersects too far with cliché, but I hope you find some real reluctance, love, and sadness mixed up in there.

Zack is a junior at Eastern University who occasionally likes to pretend he knows what he’s doing and stitches together words for fun.