Introduction

This poem is from the book : I Stole a Rock, poems of love and romance, by Sara King. Available at www.amazon.com, www.barnesandnoble.com, www.booksamillion.com, and www.iuniverse.com

Never Date a Poet

If you're a poet,
never date another poet.
For one,
you won't be able to write about them,
the stupid things they said,
the mean things they did,
or how they mutter in their sleep,
because next week at the open mic,
there he'll be in the front row.

Sure,
it's great when you fall in love.
Then you can write all those sonnets,
and love poems about butterfly wings
that make even your grandmother ill.
But one day you wake up
and realize he's a creep.
He's a poet, a weirdo,
and you hate his poems.
They're pedantic, ostentatious,
and for gods sake they rhyme!

Besides, if he's a poet,
he's going to write poems about you.
He'll say he loves your sea-green eyes,
but you'll say their hazel,
and the sea is not green anyway.
It conjures up smelly seaweed,
drunken sailors,
and these remind you of him.

Every time you get published,
he'll laugh and say,
he wouldn't be caught dead in that journal.
They don't have a literary bone in their body,
and nobody reads it anyway.
They'll just leave it at some Laundromat,
or coffeehouse for the blind.

And when you do part ways,
he'll cry for 15 minutes,
then write a poem about it,
but you won't be anywhere in it.

Copyright; Sara King
Email: prajaoui@library.berkeley.edu