Do not date boys who write poetry Their careless skill with words will Have you captured as but a passage And you are so much more than that
Date a man who knows nothing of metaphors Love someone who knows science See if he can learn your algorithms From energetic beginning To entropic end Who can experiment with bringing Luminescence to your fingertips And suns aflame within your stomach Date a man who is dyslexic with emotion Who knows nothing of metre and verse Doesnβt know how to write poems But writes you one anyway because you are his universe
Do not love boys who fall asleep with Bukowski beside their beds They will try to pretend that their eruptions Are frustrated justification for treating you like they learned from him Volcanoes, they are not, they just simmer and seethe Keeping you Vesuvius ossified In petrified acceptance that all men are *******. Going through implied inactions Inspired by a ******* You deserve better than disasters and they are dangerous And only beautiful from afar
They will never learn to write you right anyway
Similarly do not love mean who love late night cafes Black filtered coffees and white unfiltered cigarettes Their bitter jealous love will leave you in absolutes It will stain you like so much scratched and battered woodwork And here you could be a forest Though they may ******* So sincerely They are treacherous rain, Slick on pavements And storms in teacups Though they may make you wet So you call him convection clouds They are just bad weather Date someone who is up before the dawn Because they just don't know what the day holds But instead hold their cup of tea so sweet and milky You jokingly call it candy, And raise a cheers to the new morning And whose hard heavy worn hands hold hard to your form Who never touched nicotine because they lost a relative that way Who never touched verse because life is enough of an education They will know more about the world than those poetry boys anyway Don't date boys who tell you you are fire They are only looking to get burnt And will add fuel to embers to ensure you don't get put out Every sweet word is just lies Don't date boys who say your eyes are the seas To hell with cliches (and your eyes are brown anyway) If they want to drown let them find someone else With the same taste for saltwater
Don't date men who say "they can't describe you" As they will try and each and every frustrated sentence Will rattle you They will call you legends And not understand when you don't live up to the poorly Constructed reality of the myth they envisaged
Every published word smells of every other girl And remember every letter of every word they put out there Is one millions scraps of drafts as prayer So take their million million Million, million metaphors for how much they love you And return it to them unmarked or "Could have done better - don't see me" .
You are not here to teach them And you are a lesson they will not learn
This is a nod to Paula Varjack's "why you should never date an artist" one of my favourite poems by one of my favourite poets, if she's ever in town go and check her out.