The Berserker Lives

Too often it has been a beautiful lie
and has left you wounded and scarred.
Love wielded as a weapon for someone else’s protection.

But you survived. As people do. You survived
and each bloodletting has made you
stranger and stronger,

able to smell abandonment
before it crosses the horizon,
more sensitive to actions, less so to words,

able to listen and nod, calm as a sage,
while in your mind, the berserker lives.

About this poem

We all have done it. Listened quietly, while inside our guts are tied in knots, living in fight or flight. And when it happens in what is supposed to be love? That’s the worst. Like dancing on glass. Inspired by an overheard conversation at the last diner standing.

The photograph is a detail from one of my paintings, Battle of the Gods.

Tom