the thing with falling in love with a poet
is that only the heartbreak is good enough
to qualify as poetry.
all the roller-coaster rush
and the picnics on the hill
and the first time your hands brush together
on your first date and they take yours
to fill the gaps between their finger,
and the aimless walks looking for
somewhere to eat
and the first time they said i love you
but it wasn’t perfect
so they’d written you a poem
because that seemed closer
to perfect
than those three words —
somehow, at some point,
all of these gets overlooked
like words in a history book
he wouldn’t read even if he was stuck with it in a dream.

the thing with falling in love with a poet
is that it is falling in love with a stranger
who writes poetry at 8 am or 10 pm, hoping
to find his lover back in front of him
when he reaches the last word and raises up his head.
it is falling in love
with someone whose walls seem to echo
the first time they said i love you
three years ago,
it is falling in love with someone
who could still be writing about the love of his life
and sometimes, the consonants
in her name
look like the
vowel in yours
but it’s not you, honey,
sometimes,
it’s just
not you.

he said i shouldn’t mistake
falling in love with his words
for falling in love with him,
so i thought
how could that be, when his words
were the words i wanted to kiss?
how could that be, when he was
the poetry i wanted to read?

one time,
i asked him if he would write me a poem
if he ever fell out of love.

and he said he would never fall out of love.

and he did.

without any warning —
without any melancholic farewell,
or messy kisses on the kitchen floor,
or desperate pleads for us to stay.
he fell out of love with me —
without writing any heartbreak poem;

but then again, maybe it was because
all heartbreak poems, even if it was us falling apart,
would still be written for you.

the night he left,
he forgot to take his poetry collection
all written in the tattered pages
of that black notebook i got him,
and it was full of pages folded in halves
and it was full of your name in lazy scribbles
and it was full of his words
wanting you back.

it was the night we broke up
yet it was still you, breaking his heart —

it was the night he decided he could no longer pretend
he loved me.
it was the night he decided he could no longer pretend
i was you.