after Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem
And maybe our world really is tired of love poems.
Maybe every romantic trope rots on life support.
Maybe every storybook fairy tale has already perished.
This world begs poets to bury them. Seal the tomb.
Prepare a bottomless grave for every lovestruck Romeo.
Embellish a pretty urn for every Juliet staying up late
waiting for him. The end of love has been arriving
for centuries. Maybe it already happened while poets
were too busy scrawling elegies for lovers not yet lost.
If anyone held a funeral for love poems I wasn’t invited.
If anyone held a great memorial for human passions
no one showed me the photos. And thankfully so.
I am far too obsessed with this world to ever fall
out of maddening love with it. The themes might
always be the same: love, loss, life, death, but
I don’t mind. It’s still a world where poets burn
the midnight oil to preserve moments that would
otherwise fizzle out and die. A world where I am
allowed to witness it all, every bruised and tired
archetype, where I am allowed to believe in illusion.
