Notes on Loving A Poet

Advice? Don’t fall in love with a poet. Avoid the perfectly scripted promises the same way you’d run from the bullet of an angry gun and with just as much heart pounding panic and unwavering determination. Act as if the train is coming right in your direction, get off of the tracks, run as fast as you can before it’s too late.

Poets can make you believe, trust, see anything we want, anything we aren’t but wish we could be, or for a second believe we are. Able to make any mistake and every emotionally criminal decision sound like only a beautiful life lesson, something innocent, act as if it helped us grow into a better person. Don’t allow carefully structured sentences that when spoken roll off our tongues like poetic compliments, descriptive and rhythmic. Each word intentionally chosen, words we know will evoke the best of emotions to divert your attention away from what may possibly be a deal breaking confession. “I’m not in love with you” will dance off our tongue to an un-noticeably heartbreaking tune, then we’ll vanish. We’ll take with us only our notebooks and toothbrush, leaving you crushed wishing you had jumped off the train tracks just a little bit sooner.

Don’t fall in love a poet, don’t fall deep into metaphors and short stanzas, don’t allow yourself to become just another charming euphonic love poem. A love poem carried inside a notebook full of other poems to other women just like you, other women we thought we loved too.

This doesn’t mean our feelings and emotions aren’t genuine, because they are. They feel so overwhelmingly true that they must be historically documented using poetry we traded nights of sleep to spill ink and write for you. We wrote you immortality, a well-metered gift to you from me. In that moment those feelings are so grammatically heavy that we’re convinced they’re unfading, long lasting until the day we finish the last stanza, until the day we’ve filled the last page of our notebook and our poem is finished. Like a habit we can’t quit, an addiction we can’t help but indulge in, we grab a fresh notebook, a new pen and we write the first line of the next life we’ll live. We’re wanderers, our hearts are restless and take us away to places of new inspirations.

We want to experience everything, love everyone in every way, we want to feel emotions we’ve yet to put into words and to learn of the heartbreak they’ll inspire us with. We’re constantly in search of a perfect, romanticized fairy tale love that we can’t even begin to fathom doesn’t exist. We’re the constantly heartbroken heartbreakers, we break our own hearts while crushing the hearts of others under soft spoken metaphors. We’re the sad, lonely dreamers searching for something that only exists in the lines of our poetry. We keep investing our hearts, childishly believing we’ve found what it is we’ve been searching for only to set fire to every poem we read to her, we watch our words burn to ashes and disappear along with us. We’re perpetually heartbroken because we’re forever feeling as if something is missing, we’re never satisfied or happy but happiness isn’t what inspires good poetry.

Avoid loving a poet, appreciate the beautiful pictures we’ve used our words to paint of your smile, but don’t let those bullets hit you and jump off the tracks before the train comes.