Why you should never love a poet is because
Why you should never love a poet is because
It all sounds very romantic and mysterious and exciting, but
A poet is self-serving, self-obsessed, self-absorbed;
A poet is emotionally
expedient, dwarfed and illiterate.
A poet is a knot of self-loathing, a twisted heap of hate,
A wreckage of lost loves;
A poet will love you back
with love that’s passionate,
obsessive, for three hours, three days.
Three months at the outside. That’s how
Frivolous, oblivious, lascivious a poet is.
A poet is judgemental, vengeful, brutal –
To love a poet’s fruitless.
A poet will betray you four or five times a day for that
Forever-faithful, one-lover-only master/mistress
Poetry.
To love a poet is
An empire of despair,
A shopping list of want,
An ice-cold river that leads nowhere.
A poet is a tyrant, a child, an incubus, a slug,
Charming, inconstant, flighty, ineffably disarming,
Intemperate, immoderate, faceless,
“Mad, bad, and dangerous to know”,
Slovenly, lazy, quick to anger,
But in all other matters slow.
Unpredictable, distracted, addicted,
And if any good in bed,
(Which of course is unlikely:
As you’re about to come
They’ll switch from iamb to trochee)
Bound to drool on the pillow.
That’s why you should never love a poet.
You must, however,
Fall in love with a poet.
Quite regularly.