Why Two Poets Shouldn’t Date - Roch Lazarte

It will seem exciting at first
Ideal even
When two people, too in tuned with life
And love
And random ordinary things
Decide to get together
They will bare their souls to the world
They will call it art
And it will be beautiful
It will be inspired
Will move people to tears
To create their own meaning
Out of ordinary things
And love
And life

But two poets dating
Is a recipe for disaster
Tragedy personified
Like handing each other a grenade
When they first meet
And pulling the pin the moment they kiss
They are going to explode–
No one survives this

Eventually they will talk about how the coffee tastes
Bitter, cold, weak
How it no longer serves its purpose in keeping them awake
And they will know
That it’s really not about the coffee at all

They will keep talking about coffee
When they mean something else
They will keep talking about something else
When they mean coffee
But no one will talk about coffee when they mean just it

A fight is never just a fight
It is desperation in more or less a thousand words
And three drafts later
Because they won’t be able to find a word
That accurately sums up their misery

They will start dissecting each other with metaphors
Until they can’t recognize their own flesh and bones
Until nothing is real about them anymore
Because all they see is only one half of the simile
The flowers and clouds and colors and a thousand other things
But never the person behind it
Not the one they fell in love with