literature

Don't fall in love with a poet

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Literature Text

Don’t fall in love with a poet
because we can find beauty in anything
and we won’t let it go;
I fell in love with a boy because I thought the crooked
line of his mouth was a mirror image of mine,
fell in love with him because his nails were square like
headstones and I wanted to bury myself in him.

Don’t fall in love with a poet
because we notice the minutiae in every face
and we orbit like strung out satellites;
I fell in love with a girl because when she cried her skin
blossomed like an over-ripe peach, and I wondered
if I would swallow the stone by accident when I kissed her.

Don’t fall in love with a poet
because we can’t let go of the quirks we collect.
we exist like mirrors, without an object we are a blank slate
and the one thing we can’t stand are blank spaces,
that’s why we fill pages with ink to cover the silence of
-our parents’ marriage, dissolving like salt in water, but still leaving a bitter taste acrid in your mouth;
-our insecurities promising that the space under ‘achievements’ will always be as empty as our promise, our potential and our conviction;
-our friends’ freedom from emotion, their ability to forget, to let go, to wash their hearts clean after every break.

Don’t fall in love with a poet
because you will give us hope that someone wants to hear
that they are the snail we saw snapped in the road on the way to work
because your eyes are opal and your skin is protecting something fragile;
that they are the moment when 5:08am is blazing red from the digital clock
and we have spent another night dreaming without sleeping, thinking about
how your knuckles fit in our vertebrae and your middle name fits under our tongue
and how the winter will be the red holly berries of your lips and the white snowfall of
your smile, how the summer will be the shedding of pale fears, basking our spontaneity in
a beat-up convertible car, letting your hair tangle around my sunglasses, feet buried in the hot
sand of forever. But we know this scares you, all this feeling, all these words.
“I am not an image,” you say, fierce and luminescent, “I am not a handful of constellations
or a bird-bone baby, I am. I am cannot be contained in verses or stanzas or your arm-span.
I am does not rhyme with you are and you grip me like a margin,
press fingerprints like ink onto paper but I cannot be your masterpiece or your anthology,
I am. And I am leaving”

Don’t fall in love with a poet
because we will spend a lifetime trying to find the perfect way
to describe how you left us crumbling like atlas under the weight of
We were.

(I’m sat here writing about you again, is it any surprise
that my muse has your smile, my poems your absence.)
15/2/15 because we fall in love too easily, give our hearts too readily and yet our memories are steel traps. We are like elephants, we never forget (even if we want to).
© 2015 - 2024 comatose-comet
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Silverwolf51's avatar
Spellbinding. This is a work that captivates and ensnares the reader. Well done!