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
Doesn’t 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.
