Review of Forfeit

Friday 25th November 2011

Summary

Forfeit is a raw, emotionally honest poem about the lingering wounds left by betrayal and emotional harm, and the quiet decision to withdraw from love—not out of apathy, but self-protection. The speaker acknowledges that they still know they deserve love, “like you know your own name,” yet the pain of past injury creates an inner resistance. The poem traces the complex dance between desire and disillusionment, longing and loss, and the slow erosion of trust in a world where “love’s not a game.”

Why This Poem Matters

What makes this poem resonate so deeply is its emotional specificity—it doesn’t generalise about heartbreak, it embodies it. From the first lines:

“So even though you know / That you deserve love / Like you know your own name / Like you know the colour of the sky”

We are reminded that the speaker’s belief in their worth isn’t the problem—it’s not low self-esteem or confusion. The awareness is intact. But knowledge alone isn’t enough to heal the kind of soul-deep hurt that reshapes your experience of love.

“Because the pieces of your heart / Back together anymore, don’t quite fit”

Here, the metaphor of a broken heart is literalised. It’s not just broken—it’s been reassembled, but misaligned. There’s a beautiful sadness in this image, like trying to glue a shattered bowl only to find that the cracks still show, and it doesn’t quite hold water.

This sense of misalignment continues with:

“And you don’t quite feel like dancing anymore / To the acid-jazz waltz, tango, tiptoe / Through love’s emotional array”

This dance imagery is rich: waltz, tango, tiptoe—romantic movements, now tinged with discomfort. “Acid-jazz” adds a layer of dissonance, suggesting that even beauty now feels off-key. This isn’t just the avoidance of love; it’s a sensory disorientation, a kind of emotional synaesthesia where joy has been rewired to pain.

The poem then drills into the cause:

“Downright wilful damage by those / Entrusted with the care and condition / Of one’s tender heart throes”

This is one of the most powerful turns in the piece. It’s not simply about heartbreak—it’s about betrayal of trust. The emphasis on entrustment elevates the emotional stakes. The damage wasn’t accidental. It was deliberate—or at least, careless enough to feel deliberate.

“Can never be forgotten / Never be the same”

This is a quiet but irrevocable truth. The speaker isn’t melodramatic here—they’re matter-of-fact. The experience has changed them. There is no going back to a time before the fracture. That truth gives this poem its gravitas.

And then we arrive at a final unraveling:

“Predisposed / To never staying present in the now and again / For any decent length of time”

This is a striking way to describe trauma’s lingering effects: not just in the heart, but in time itself. The present becomes a hostile or unstable space. The mind fractures, loops, dissociates. You can’t anchor yourself anymore, not securely.

The closing lines affirm the poem’s central moral:

“Fractured heart, tangled mind / Love’s not a game, / Love’s not a game!”

By ending on repetition, the poet underlines the injustice that’s occurred: love, which should be sacred, mutual, and nourishing, has been treated as disposable, strategic—even cruel. This emphatic repetition becomes a protest, a reclamation of truth.

The Metaphysical and the Material

Though grounded in human pain, the poem still has a spiritual pulse. There’s a metaphysical thread running through it—about time, memory, emotional inheritance. “Seasonal ghosts and echoes” hint at the cyclical haunting of past experience, which now lives almost autonomously in the psyche.

And yet, the metaphysical doesn’t escape the material—heart and mind are still bound to the body’s capacity to feel, to remember, to react. This fusion gives the poem its power.

In Conclusion

Forfeit is a deeply compassionate meditation on how people can retreat from love, not because they’ve stopped believing in it, but because they’ve been deeply injured by its misuse. The poem invites the reader into that intimate, silent place where love is still wanted—but no longer feels safe.

It reminds us that love, in its truest form, demands responsibility, care, and reverence. And when that reverence is broken, the damage can linger far beyond the original rupture.

With this piece, the poet speaks to anyone who’s ever tried to put themselves back together—and found that the pieces, though present, no longer align.