you
thought
you could
bring me pain
and it would be fine
but you have made a big mistake
because I refuse to be hurt by people like you
it is time for you to meet the secret part of me
that a regretful few have seen
my revenge comes now
and I say
goodbye
to
you
Which one of the above characters is doing the speaking?
Some might think that the woman is the speaker and she has been hurt by the man, but could it be the other way around instead?
Also, what exactly is the revenge that the speaker refers to near the end? Is it that he or she is simply leaving the other person?
Or could it be that he or she has something far, far more sinister in mind?
I know the answers — but I’m not saying what they are.
The inspiration for this Fibonacci poem came from a writing prompt created by my wife Lisa. A big part of her prompt dealt with secrets.
I was originally going to write a short story centered around a huge secret but decided instead to write a short poem. My initial thought was to write a Haiku or a Tanka poem but I opted to go with a Fibonacci, which I usually find to be a very fun challenge to write.
If you’re unfamiliar with how Fibonacci (Fib) poems are structured, they’re based on the mathematical sequence known as the Fibonacci sequence, in which each number within a sequence of numbers is the sum of the two proceeding numbers. Here are the first several numbers:
0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34,…
And it keeps going on from there.
In a fib poem, each line of the poem must be comprised of words in which the total number of syllable counts per line follows the above sequence. A lot of fibs do not exceed eight lines, but the length is optional, depending on how the poet decides to write it.
(NOTE: Here is a great site that helps make syllable counting easy — and here’s a second one.)
For The Secret Part of Me, I decided to a seven-line fib, in which the last line contains 13 syllables. Then I did the same thing in reverse numerical order (which is called a reverse Fibonacci/Fib.)
Therefore, my poem’s syllable count per line was 1,1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, and then 13, 8, 5, 3, 2, 1, and 1.
But that’s enough math here for today.
Thank you for reading the above. I hope you have a wonderful day!
A slightly different version of the above was originally published on Medium.
NOTE: The image in this piece is an AI-generated image created by the author using Adobe Firefly.
Buddy Gott 